Ghost Country (42 page)

When one of the deacons repeated Rafe’s remark, the pastor laughed it off in public. A church was like a family, with children always telling on each other to Mom; he couldn’t be seen responding to such third-party reports.

Privately he was angry. It was exhausting to run a church as big as Orleans Street, with its warring factions. Parish leaders like Sylvia and Rafe made his job harder by always attacking him instead of trying to help their followers accept compromise.

For instance, Sylvia was furious that the parish had voted to close the Friday mental health clinic for the homeless. She accused Emerson of being afraid of both women and the poor. But it wasn’t that simple. When Sylvia persuaded the parish to provide sanctuary for Salvadoran refugees in the eighties, Emerson had backed her fully, despite negative pressure both within the church and from the State Department.

Sylvia refused to understand that the situation was totally different now. The parish was so badly divided over the issue of the homeless women that it might well split. Sylvia wouldn’t acknowledge that, or give Emerson credit for keeping Hagar’s House open over the virulent objections of Rafe and his camp.

Sylvia and her supporters also failed to see how dangerous the creature Starr was. Unlike the doctor and Mrs. Ephers, the pastor didn’t blame Mara Stonds for the problems in the parish and the city. He had baptized Mara, and presided over her confirmation; she had always been a turbulent, passionate girl, not easy to work with like her beautiful older sister, but needing more outlet for her energies than he suspected she found in the Graham Street apartment. It didn’t surprise Emerson that Mara attached herself to Starr; Mara was the kind of intense person who would be an easy target for a charismatic charlatan.

And the public should be fully aware that Starr was a dangerous cult leader. Whether Starr was a kind of genuine medium, speaking in grunts that only Luisa Montcrief could interpret, or whether she
was a charlatan cynically playing with the emotions of women like Mara, Emerson didn’t care. The point was that Starr threatened the stability of his parish, of the city—really, of all human relationships.

Emerson realized this the day he encountered Starr at the wall. Her mocking smile, her voluptuary’s body, didn’t arouse him the way they did both Dr. Hanaper and the monsignor. Starr’s wantonness seemed to Emerson more dangerous than mere sexuality: in her face he read a delight in overthrowing—everything. Emerson thought she took a malicious pleasure in Hanaper’s and Monsignor Mulvaney’s discomfort, that she laughed as they lost self-control. Emerson had a sudden vision, through her eyes, of people all over the world casting off authority. The anarchy she invited would destroy property, families, churches, all the deepest structures of civilization.

He came back to his church determined to restore the faith once delivered to the saints, with a strong home, a strong family as a bastion of stability. He couldn’t get Sylvia Lenore to see that didn’t mean he shared Rafe’s vision of the historically sanctioned patriarchy. Sometimes authority is necessary for stability, but Sylvia wouldn’t agree.

On the other side of the aisle, Rafe’s faction was almost crowing in public: Before last Sunday’s sermon, fewer than twenty men—including Rafe’s own son Jared, under duress—had signed up for Rafe’s seminar. By the end of the week, with the promise of sex and sin from the pulpit, with the chance to exchange titillating stories over sandwiches, almost two hundred people had decided to attend. Even Dr. Stonds had decided to attend, at least the communion part of the service, with his housekeeper and granddaughter, Harriet. His chin thrust out, he told Emerson he was not going to have the community think they could embarrass him into skulking at home.

Now Cynthia, her back aching, spread mayonnaise on the six-hundredth piece of bread while Mrs. Ephers laid on ham or turkey in alternating slices, Mrs. Thirkell added a piece of lettuce, and Patsy Wanachs cut it in half before putting it on one of the trays.

Of course, the church’s janitorial staff was doing the actual setup for Rafe’s meeting in the big assembly hall—moving chairs into the concentric quarter-circles Rafe specified, the podium in the middle, testing the PA system, organizing refreshment tables in the rear—but the women’s work for such a large gathering was not physically easy.

Once the sandwiches were finished, the women set out hundreds of plates, clean forks, thirty dozen pottery cups, and filled the great coffee urns with water. Then they brought out silver trays of communion glasses, and carried them into the chancel with several gallon jugs of grape juice. A couple of the homeless women, Nicole and Caroline, drifted along to help. The shelter was closed during the day, but no one could turn them away from a worship service.

Cynthia thought she heard voices in the organ loft as they started filling the glasses. She squinted down the length of the nave, wondering if someone from the choir was there early, but couldn’t see anyone.

Back in the kitchen fragments of Rafe’s talk wafted in from the big assembly room. He had been reciting it to Cynthia all week at home, enraptured at the thought of a whole church listening to him; now he was doing it again with Jared an unwilling audience, ostensibly to test the sound system: The millennium is at hand, but what have we really accomplished in two thousand years? … The loss of respect for the family, and the father as its real head…. Women in the New Testament were devout, and respectful of male authority…. When the Puritans came to America … apostolic form of government … the city on a hill … abomination upon abomination…. Now, women gathering around a broken-down wall … symptomatic of end to … men could learn something from the feminists: assertiveness training … doormats were made to be walked on … Christ will judge us on how we look after our families … abrogated responsibility to the feminists …

Cynthia’s head was pounding from the racket—Rafe, the snorts and glugs of the coffeemakers, Mrs. Ephers whispering in her ear.
Every now and then the housekeeper would dig a bony hand into Cynthia’s shoulder and breathe new imprecations against Mara as the root of all the evils the Stonds family was undergoing—perhaps of all the evils Rafe was claiming had befallen America since the New England theocracies were overturned for good in the 1820s.

“You thought Mara was so special,” Mrs. Ephers hissed, “but you see different now, don’t you?”

Muttering that she’d forgotten something, Cynthia went back through the vestry into the apse. Inside the doorway she stopped in terror: burglars had broken in and were looting the chancel. No, not burglars, women from Hagar’s House. Where they shouldn’t be. Her knees still shaking from her foolish fright, Cynthia tried to march in on them authoritatively. Her squeaky reprimand died in her throat. Mara Stonds. That horrible woman Starr, her breasts swaying as she bent over one of the grape juice jugs.

“Cynthia!” Mara caught sight of her. “We’re just drinking some of the leftover grape juice. We watched you filling the glasses and saw you didn’t use it all up. Everyone’s thirsty. Don’t worry, we won’t get stuff dirty. What’s going on?”

“Mara.” Cynthia couldn’t get her voice to rise above a dreamlike squawk. “Mara, you can’t stay here. There’s going to be a church service in an hour. Communion and everything.”

“We’ll be quiet,” Mara said, looking at Luisa, who didn’t stay quiet anywhere for long, and was querulous now because she’d been hoping the jugs contained wine. “We’re seeking sanctuary here, like those Salvadoran refugees. I don’t think the cops can haul us right out of the church, can they? Anyway, just to be on the safe side, I called the television stations. They’ll probably be here in time to cover the service. What’s it about?”

“You, you dummy,” Cynthia squeaked. “We’re being penitential because we produced a loser like you. And Daddy’s Family Matters seminar will start right after, so get out of here before you get me in trouble one more time. And take
her
with you.”

Starr stopped her exploration of the chancel: fingering the embroidered
crosses on the covering to the stone communion table, rubbing the four-foot-high gold candlesticks, which she lifted as though they were cardboard, inspecting the great Bible on its massive lectern.

Starr walked over to Cynthia and tilted her chin up. When Cynthia turned red and backed away, Starr laughed, a low, mocking hoot. An echoing laugh behind her made Cynthia whirl around: that black homeless woman, whatever her name was, was sitting in the front pew with her white sidekick, drinking from another one of the half-empty jugs. The two of them seemed to think Cynthia was some kind of joke.

“Get out right now, or I’ll go call Daddy!” Cynthia screamed.

Mara tried to put an arm around her friend, but Cynthia wrenched herself free. “I mean it, Mara Stonds.”

“Okay, okay, calm down. We’ll get out of the chancel before the service starts. If Rafe sees us, we’ll tell him you tried everything to get rid of us, even bleach, but the stain was too big. No, no, just teasing, sorry. We won’t let on you laid eyes on us.”

As Cynthia watched, Mara conferred with Luisa, who was sulky but finally seemed to agree with her. Luisa pulled Starr’s head down near her own, while Mara went down the shallow steps to Jacqui and Nanette and talked to them. In a moment all five women got up and trooped toward the back of the church. A sixth figure, LaBelle, who’d hovered in the shadows around the middle of the pews, joined them.

“What are you doing?” Cynthia cried as they made their way not to the exit, but to the north side of the narthex, where stairs led to the choir loft.

Mara’s voice, muffled by the stairwell, bounced around the empty nave. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll be in the galleries and no one will know we’re there. If Don Sandstrom shows up from Channel 13, tell him where we are, okay?”

Mrs. Ephers found Cynthia a few minutes later, standing at the top of the chancel steps, her fingers in her mouth. If it was true that
Rafe Lowrie beat her, he had provocation, the housekeeper thought: the stupid girl looked like a sheep. Typical of Mara to take up with her.

“Cynthia! What are you doing mooning around like this when there are a million things to do? Your father wants to see you—he doesn’t like the way you’ve pinned up his slogans. And what are these grape juice jugs doing on the front pews? Have you been sitting here drinking out of the communion bottles while Patsy Wanachs and I were slaving out back?”

“No, ma’am,” Cynthia muttered; She looked up to the right, to the north gallery, where Starr’s horns of hair were faintly visible, then followed the housekeeper back into the refectory.

G
OD ORDERED EZEKIEL
to put a mark on those few who were horrified by the abominations they were witnessing: the righteous who hated the women wailing at the north gate of the temple for their pagan god Dumuzi and his consort Ishtar, those who abhorred the harlot and her filthy acts. Ezekiel searched out that handful who despised the pornography and blasphemy around them, and he put on them the mark of salvation. Only those who bore that mark were spared. The angel of the Lord went through Jerusalem, that great city, and smote all who were without the sign of salvation, from the oldest grandfather to the newest born daughter.”

Pastor Emerson paused to survey the congregation. They were listening intently: good, not like earlier, during the long dull litany Rafe had insisted on writing and leading. While Rafe’s hoarse bullying voice recited his neighbors’ sins, Emerson had noticed people leafing through their hymnals, fiddling with things in their purses, and welcoming the stir caused by Harriet Stonds’s late arrival with the young Jewish doctor.

Everyone had seen that Harriet wasn’t with Mrs. Ephers and Dr. Stonds at the start of the service. The doctor came in, alone,
during the prelude. He looked more forbidding than usual when he joined Mrs. Ephers in the pew at the front of the church, so much so that no one felt like approaching him to ask about Harriet.

Perhaps she had to work on Saturday, neighbor whispered to neighbor. After all, the riot at the wall last night had been frontpage news; she was the hotel’s lawyer, who knew what fresh trouble those monstrous women had caused.

No, no, Mrs. Thirkell said: I asked Hilda Ephers while we were making sandwiches if Harriet was coming, and she said Harriet was behaving abominably, had started to turn on the doctor just like her mother and her sister. You should have heard what she said to Hilda last night … yes and then slammed out of the apartment, leaving Hilda to hang up her clothes, as if she wasn’t eighty years old and recovering from a heart attack.

A louder murmur went up when Harriet actually arrived, halfway through Rafe’s litany. She was pale but tidy in a blue cotton dress—she’d watched Grandfather leave the apartment before going up to bathe and change, spending as little time as possible in her cold marble bathroom.

A thin dark man was at her side. The young doctor, Patsy Wanachs spread the news along the opposite aisle, that Jewish doctor who encouraged the homeless women to riot at the wall. The ensuing whisper rose to such a buzz that people at the front of the church turned to stare at Harriet and her escort. Even Mrs. Ephers heard the comments and turned to look. Mrs. Thirkell was close enough to see the veins in the old woman’s cheeks burn red at the sight of Harriet. The housekeeper looked away quickly and began to read loudly in unison with Rafe: We have forgotten the Fifth Commandment. Our children no longer honor us as parents because we have not been strong enough to make them respect us.

Cynthia, squashed between Jared and Mrs. Thirkell, only dared look when her brother did. If Rafe, moving from the Fifth to the Sixth Commandment, saw she wasn’t listening to him …

Harriet spotted Cynthia Lowrie and pointed her out to Hector, which made Cynthia quickly face front again. Others noticed that
Harriet was not taking part in the service at all: a typical Stonds, too snotty for peons like them. If she wasn’t going to read the prayers, why had she even bothered to show up?