The Next Queen of Heaven

  Since possessing him is impossible, I want to love Willem without possessing him. I want to have him without holding him, or to hold him without having him, for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, with our other partners and lovers and parents and children in tow, till—till whenever.

  And since that’s not likely, not now, not yet, what I want, thought Jeremy, is a life free of him.

  Mother Clare du Plessix sat down and said, “Let me catch my breath. Sing for me.”

  Jeremy picked up the guitar and began; Marty joined at the bridge.

  They were missing Sean’s nasal, pitch-perfect high A on the end. But the sound was good, anyway; the rehearsals had been paying off. Mother Clare du Plessix smiled distractedly, and Jeremy waited for a benediction. “An awful lot of words, aren’t there?” she said.

  “Well,” said Jeremy. “It’s supposed to build.”

  “Oh, that it does,” said Mother Clare. “I suppose I should hear it again. Not just now—” she protested. “I have come along to get your opinion on something. I just had a phone call from Father Sheehy at your parish. Sweet man. Distraught—Sister Alice and the church in the same week. Horrible, really. It makes you wonder.”

  “The chapel,” said Sister Clothilde, nudging Mother Clare gently.

  “Father Sheehy called and we discussed the possibility of having your midnight mass Christmas service at our chapel,” she continued. “The only other option that seems viable is some gymnasium at the local secondary school, he said. You know the chapel better than he does, having seen it several times this fall. He asked you to make the decision and for me to call him back with it.”

  “Well, the chapel is small,” replied Jeremy. “I mean, smaller than Our Lady’s. But I suspect a fair number of parishioners wouldn’t come this far for midnight mass if it wasn’t what they were used to. Does he propose having all the Sunday services here, too?”

  “No, no. I believe the Pastor from that start-up next door to Our Lady’s is being very generous. But of course Christmas Eve is special and the other church requires their space, too. Apparently there needs to be some decorating and so on. Father Sheehy is going to rely on you to help set things up.”

  “Rig them up,” said Jeremy. “I hope he’s not going to bring the Magical Flying Baby Jesus here.”

  Mother Clare’s face folded, like an old-fashioned accordion camera. There were things she did not have the reserves to consider, and she looked as if she hoped she hadn’t heard Jeremy correctly. “If you approve, then, I shall have Sister Clothilde place a telephone call to the Rectory of Our Lady’s,” she said, rising. “I do hope he’s not doing this just to make us old nuns feel—included.”

  “Well, what if he is?” said Jeremy, thinking of his need to be included in Willem’s life.

  “The whole notion of the cloister still escapes you, doesn’t it? At least one of the many reasons one enters is not to escape the world because it is too painful, but because it is too beautiful to bear.”

  Marty said, “Hey, sister, there’s the answer to your problem of attrition. You should start accepting men. I nominate Jeremy. He’s, like, totally qualified. Can’t deal with the beauty of the world. The first male nun. It’s a win-win, don’t you think?”

  “I believe my being hard-of-hearing is serving me very well just now,” said Mother Clare, “for which be praised Jesus and all the saints. Saint Marty of Flatbush among them.”

  33

  THE NURSE’S STATION, strung round with hard-boiled colored lights, was empty except for Marilee Gompers, an alien on the command deck of an enemy spacecraft. Jeremy flashed her a smile as she glanced up from the folded strips of paper candy canes she’d been snipping out of gift wrap. “Season’s greetings,” he offered, nondenominationally.

  “Hey you,” she said. “Come here.” He did. “His folks had to step out to do some last-minute shopping. They must be caught in traffic. They don’t want you left alone with him but I figure, now’s your chance.”

  “You want me to—kidnap him?”

  She wasn’t amused.

  He shrugged. “They won’t tell me anything.”

  “I put it at six weeks.”

  “Six weeks? Till he gets out?”

  “Six weeks, honey.” Her voice was cool and soft and her eyes followed her scissors, which angled more slowly, deliberately. “Six weeks. You know what I’m saying to you?”

  He nodded, more surprised than aghast. “Is he comfortable?”

  “I know how this happens. At a certain point it can get kind of peaceful.” She looked up from under her horrible bangs. Her eyes had the glint of scissors in them. “You can take it on faith. He’s not that peaceful yet, but he’s on his way.”

  Jeremy dropped his gaze to the pleated candy canes.

  “I believe it comes down to something simple. It’s pretty basic. It’s not that he’s happy to leave you. He just wants to go home. It’s the same for everyone.”

  “What are you saying to me?”

  “He’s sleeping a lot. Here. Make some decorations for me, will you? Brighten up that room with some nice stars.” She handed him the supplies. “Say what you need to. This might be your last chance before the ogres return.”

  Sean was too doped up to talk. His eyes were open, though. “Hey there, big boy,” said Jeremy. “Anything special you want for Christmas?”

  The radiators clanked. Antiseptic holiday ditties from the hallway corrupted the evening. A new roommate in the next bed wheezed, courtesy of an oxygen machine. Sean raised his left arm and gestured toward the roommate, the window, the falling dark. Jeremy wondered. Oxygen?

  Sean’s arm fell against the copy of Redbook boasting Christmas Plum Pudding Even a Scrooge Could Love! The pulmonary appliance made a sound as of faraway raveling, like a train on a horizon.

  34

  ON THE DAY before Christmas Eve, Peggy Mueller arrived to help Jeremy and Father Mike set up the chapel at the convent of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries. She brandished new-cut branches, decorations and tools, and a can of spray-on pine scent in case the balsam gave up the ghost too quickly. The sap was redolent enough; Sister Perpetua got to sneezing and had to abandon her devotions and run for cover.

  Jeremy thought: Peggy’s throwing herself into the service of the Church with more fervor than usual; she hadn’t approved of Sister Alice’s managerial clout, so Father Mike’s need provides her an occasion to ambush him with her efficiency. Rushing in where angels fear to tread. I might take lessons.

  Father Mike and Jeremy carted in the crèche, a good-size set turned out of plaster molds sometime in the early part of the century. The Virgin and Joseph knelt a good three feet high. The shepherds and wise men stood smaller—a tautological distinction, wondered Jeremy, or had they come from a smaller set to save some money? A cute lamb looked somewhat devilish due to an extra flourish of dark eyebrows, though do lambs actually have eyebrows? The lone cow, any way they turned it, appeared about to belch. The camel had lost most of its nose, perhaps to syphilis. The wise men were bracingly multiracial. One of them glared with ovoid eyes, a cross between Krishna and Dracula; another was black and shiny as a Steinway; the third resembled an anthropomorphized aubergine. The shepherds were dressed in bathrobes like grade school boys at Christmas pageants; Jeremy got the feeling that beneath the robes, the shepherds were wearing ceramic pajamas printed all over with Bart Simpson.

  He had no desire to stand again on that wobbly grate over the crypt while he was leading the congregation in Christmas music. The world was shaky enough. Instead, he staked out the left side of the chapel for the music ministry. (What he called privately “altar right,” as in “stage right”—the altar being the proper point of coordinates from which to determine the room’s orientation. But only privately.) So Father Mike and Peggy set up the manger on the church right (altar left). The plaster crèche came with removable plaster straw, so they removed it, and Peggy arranged some extra balsam boughs there. “Tomorrow nig
ht I’ll give them a good spritz of Pine Fresh to remind them of their duty,” she said, apparently to Jesus on the cross above the altar, as Jeremy and Father Mike were heading to the choir loft.

  “I hate the Incredible Flying Baby Jesus,” said Jeremy. “Do we have to?”

  “Jeremy, don’t be a wet blanket. Father Orsini brought this local custom from Sicily home when he was returned from his wartime posting. It’s remained a staple of the Christmas Eve service of Our Lady’s ever since. We’re not giving up on it at this point. Please.”

  In the vestibule of Our Lady’s, and therefore saved from fire and smoke damage, the crèche had been set up since the First Sunday of Advent. The whole kit and caboodle except the Holy Family. “It’s parish tradition to introduce Joseph and Mary on the fourth Sunday of Advent, and leave the crèche gaping empty as they kneel, staring expectantly into it. I love that porcelain expectation,” said Father Mike, going a little teary on him. “And you just watch the tithing drop if we were to retire this bit. They wait all year for it.”

  “I know, never mind,” said Jeremy. He knew the drill. On Christmas Eve his program of music would kick off at 11:15 p.m. Partly a concert, partly a community sing to entertain hearty souls who came early to midnight mass to get seats and avoid having to stand in the back. At 11:55, the lights would dim, and the soprano on call would launch into “O Holy Night.” At the minor key bridge—”Fall on your knees, oh hear the angels singing”—the sacristan, waiting in the choir loft, would hook the Incredible Flying Baby Jesus onto the guy cable with a twist of copper wiring. A little nudge—the cords were lightly greased—and the Baby Jesus would come sailing slantways through the incredible darkness. The other end of the cable hooked precisely to the head of the crib, where the Baby Jesus arrived by the close of the verse. Some years at a zippy speed, so the pine boughs on the receiving end needed to be arranged carefully to cushion the landing.

  “It’s just that it’s so obvious,” said Jeremy.

  “What’s wrong with obvious?” asked Father Mike. “Obvious is consoling. It’s bad enough that our own space is off-limits until we can schedule the county inspectors and get the insurance papers filed. Something Sister Alice could have done with her hands tied behind her back. But the death of Sister Alice, her funeral, the whole nine yards—everyone will think of that when they come back to this chapel. So we need these figures, we need this arrival. It’s a different moment. We need this child more than ever.”

  “The millennial Christ.”

  “Don’t be snarky.”

  They worked for seventy minutes tightening the guy wire, loosening it, sending the Baby for a couple of trial runs. The angle was steeper here than in Our Lady’s, so Father Mike had to catch the child headfirst, as if it had been evacuated out of a heavenly womb like a projectile missile. “Gotta slow this Baby down. Any suggestions?”

  “We could go to the IGA-Plus and get some of those twisties they put around the base of lettuces,” suggested Jeremy. “We could fray the paper and fringe it, and wrap it around the connecting wire. The friction should provide some drag.”

  “Black yarn,” called Peggy, washing the face of the donkey lovingly. “If the nuns don’t have black yarn around this place, I’ll convert to Buddhism. Doesn’t this donkey look as if it has put on a little weight since last year? I wonder if she’s pregnant.”

  35

  TABITHA WAS STUCK. She couldn’t carry out her vague plan of clonking her mother now, not with the police having shown up several times to talk to her about Hogan and Kirk. Her mother dying the same week as the Catholic church catching on fire wouldn’t look like an accident. Pity the goddamn church hadn’t burned to the ground; everybody said it was mostly cosmetic damage, which made Linda Pearl snort and say, “Honey, you ain’t seen cosmetic damage till you get a load of what I’m going to do to Polly Osterhaus on the day before her wedding.”

  “Oh, Linda Pearl,” said Tabitha, “grow up.”

  Linda Pearl looked at Tabitha sullenly. “You’re giving up? Is that it? You’re letting your man walk out of your life? You’re not going to put up a fight?”

  “You’re not making this any easier,” said Tabitha. She was majorly flipping out. She’d rather be home, but she was trying to duck the police. She didn’t know anything about the church fire. Maybe Kirk had set it, pissed off at Jeremy for some sicko reason or other. Maybe Hog had set it. She wasn’t asking because she didn’t want to know. She needed to be blameless in all things from now on, and sometimes that meant keeping your eyes closed. An act of willpower.

  Willpower was an old-fashioned mom-whip that Tabitha was thinking about a lot these days. Maybe there was something to it. If Tabitha had a son, maybe she should name him Will. Or Power: was that too corny? But Power Scales sounded like something used over at the paper mill.

  She was trying to be good, somehow, and Linda Pearl made her feel sullied and sour. “Just you do Polly up the way she wants,” said Tabitha. “I gotta go. Hair spray and doughnuts are making me yucko.”

  “I got a constitutional right to express my rage,” said Linda Pearl. “No one can take that away from me. I’m your loyal friend even if you’re being Miss Wimpella, the Pagan Queen of Christian Martyrs.”

  Tabitha walked home, one step after the other, watching her feet. Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, you break the devil’s back. Which crack was which—or were they the same? Spooky. She shattered dozens of unidentified vertebrae before she reached the corner.

  No police cars loitered in front of the Scales house, but Pastor Huyck’s car squatted there. Shit. The more forcefully tender he got, the more he gave her the willies. She couldn’t stand that pious gaze. She pictured smashing his face with a baseball bat, but realized that maybe her thoughts of braining her mother were becoming a habit. Watch it, baby, she said to herself. There is a beginning and an ending cooking up, so mind your step.

  She and the unknown universe trudged through the unshoveled walk up to the front door and pushed in.

  She was glad to see that her mother wasn’t sacked out on the floor of the living room. Kirk must have dragged her into her bedroom in case the cops came back. Pastor Huyck weighed down the middle of the sofa, the far ends of both seat cushions elevating three or four inches. Tabitha suppressed the urge to push right by him without a hello. He could be undercover for the cops. “The gifts of the season!” said Pastor Huyck, eyeing her breasts.

  “Who let you in?” she said, as graciously as she could.

  “I’d say that Mother did.” For an instant she thought he meant it, and her heart lilted even though she’d been readying to ice her mother. “She came to me in a dream just as she came to me in real life, and said, Be my pastor. Take care of my little girl.”

  “Oh, dreams. That figures. She doesn’t get around much in real life.”

  “I’m not one for dream visitations,” said Pastor Huyck, a holiday ruddiness on his face. “This was however a potent experience. You were in it.”

  “Oooh.” Tabitha felt as if she’d just found ants in the sugar.

  “This is a very holy time. I’ve come to see if I can help getting Mother to services tomorrow night.”

  “She might come to you in a dream, but she’s pretty useless on her legs now. Hell in a handbasket, maybe, but you’d need a pretty hefty handbasket. She’s not going anywhere fast.”

  “The rewards of the holy feast might revive her.”

  “She has a thing about your church now.” Tabitha tried to be as kind as she could. “She bucked and clawed and twisted when we tried to bring her there. You know that.”

  “You’ve said she’s less mobile. She’d be less resistant now.”

  “That’d be taking advantage. Why not just let her be.”

  “You come then. Come in Mother’s place. Come home. Come here.” He patted the sofa beside him. “You’ve been carrying this load too long, Tabitha, and I’ve been a bad pastor to you. You look like you need a holiday
hug. Sit down.”

  “I, um, can’t.” She looked about. “I got to, got to—” Her eye fell on a dusty photo album that had fallen off a heap of pirated videos of X-Files that Hog must’ve been rooting through. “I’ve been looking for a picture.”

  She lunged for the book as Pastor Huyck got up. The sofa cushions sighed. “I’ll help you look.”

  “I can look myself.” She put it down on the side table and began to flip pages. Too bad there wasn’t a recipe for poison communion bread in here. She felt him enter her airspace, and smelled him, a thunderhead of Old Spice masking a hint of vinegar. Or was that something sweetly alcoholic, like sherry?

  “What’re you looking for?” He put one set of gorilla knuckles on the tabletop beside the book, and the other set on her shoulder. He massed against the back of her knees to her shoulder blade. She could feel the car keys in his left pocket as he began to rotate his body more centrally to line up with her spine.

  “This, here it is.” At random she tore out an old snapshot, the kind from beyond time, with rippled white edges, when the world could be remembered only in black and white.

  “Who is it?”

  She could hardly talk. “It’s Grandmother Prelutski, my mom’s mother. Don’t do that.”

  He put his chin on her shoulder, squinting. “She looks pretty fierce.”

  “Mom called her Mother Stalin. She raised Mom alone ‘cause her husband took off to shack up with some filthy whore from Hattiesburg, Virginia.’”

  “Yet Mother learned to be a good mother from her.”

  “Well, that’s debatable. Stop that.”

  His lips were in her hair and his left hand had reached her breast. She couldn’t think. But maybe this wasn’t the time for thinking. Shy of a wrench, shy of a convenient portable gas can and a match, she reached for the only thing she had, the photo album. She closed it with both hands and sighed as if remembering the crimes of her family background, and then she heaved it up backhand right against Pastor Huyck’s face. It wasn’t heavy enough to hurt much but it scraped his glasses off his face, and as he turned to grab them she ducked out under his left arm.