The light splashed as much shadow as anything else, and in the arrangement of shadows could the architecture of the crypt be understood. A dozen or so separate walled-up chambers, like closed bread ovens. On either side of the doors were the lopsided crosses. An inventory system, no doubt, to help Brother Cryptmaster know when a chamber was full.
She sank to her haunches, feeling more than seeing. Feeling was the only sense that made sense, here.
It was, she imagined, Gervasa’s hands within hers that found the cross with the slash through it, next to an opening near the floor that, yes, just might appear a bit more tidily bricked in than its neighbors. As if the shroud and the statue had been removed and the wall repaired 150 or 170 years ago. Certainly more recently than seven hundred years ago.
“Here we are. This is it. The slashed cross. A poor woman who died without the benefit of the final sacrament. As good as cursed.”
The priest translated. The nun sighed in mild irritation.
“No,” said Soeur Godelieve, through the labyrinth of translation. “Someone cared enough for the deceased to lay the body here, after all. This is not hallowed ground, we think, but this entire place is holy. The earth is sacred here. No one is cursed.”
“She was a peasant, burned to death. She was buried with a child inside her womb, nearly ready to be born,” explained Winnie.
“No, she wasn’t,” said Soeur Godelieve. She trained her flashlight to other walled-up apertures. “Look here. Look here.” A few more crosses. “Noblewomen dying in childbirth and their infants not surviving them—look.” The light centered on a small cross next to a larger one and slightly superimposed upon it. The crosspiece of the baby one bisected the upright of the larger one. “Mother and child. Mother and child. Very common. That’s how they marked it, so that the prayers for the remembrance of the souls of the dead could be said.”
“But this body is not with them. It is apart,” said Winnie. “The cross with the slash through it.”
“But you are wrong. Very wrong. It is not a slash. Look, foolish child.” The priest did not flinch at translating the remonstrating adjective. “No one would bury a body in a crypt and say, ‘Don’t remember me, don’t pray for me.’ A waste of effort. If she was not to be prayed for, she’d have been dumped in a bog, a pauper’s grave somewhere. This is not a slash. It’s not a prohibitive mark. Look. It’s a sprig of holly. It’s a bit of life marking this grave. If she was pregnant, the baby lived. That’s what the sign says. In this chamber, anyway, of women and infants dead in childbirth.”
Winnie’s voice trembled. “Some time ago a statue was found in there. A Virgin and Child. It was removed and taken to England.”
“Bring it back,” said the nun, as if Winnie were talking yesterday.
“I can’t do everything.”
“Hmmmmph.”
The priest said, “It will take me a long time to climb all those stairs back up. Your family is waiting. Let us go.”
“If someone thought to lay a corpse with a holy statue of the Madonna and Child,” said Soeur Godelieve, with a gleam of historiographic conviction, “it was an act of charity, to comfort the corpse. The statue was put in there for consolation. Christ is the child of every mother,” she concluded smugly.
“Someone loved that dead woman,” said the priest. “Come.”
The Gervasa virus sat within Winnie with a different heft now. If it were a meal, it would be curdling, but the ghost was not a meal to be digested, nor a tumor to be excised. The effects on Winnie were peculiar. Her palms were damp and her temples pulsed, and the wood grain on the arms of the chair in which she sat seemed alert enough to raise its ridges and bite her forearms. The news had been good, had it not? Proof, of a sort, the only proof possible, that Gervasa had been buried without her baby. The twitching limbs of the medieval Church had managed to honor her plea bargain. But why was there no sense of elation? Gervasa was pooled in a sack of silence. Maybe she was dying in there, finishing her dying, now, at last.
“Who is coming?” asked Winnie, to change the subject, though no one was speaking.
“Your family.” The priest shrugged as if to say, Family, who can even recognize the concept anymore?
Winnie looked at the priest and thought of her own father. She rarely thought of him. But there was a cat in her childhood, some selfish bag of bones named Fluffy or such, who died as cats are prone to do, without giving proper notice. The cat had received as much of a Catholic burial as was permitted cats, but Winnie had nonetheless been hard to console. Her dad had taken her up on his lap and spooled out platitudes about God and the afterlife. God and God’s plan. “But Daddy,” she’d wailed, taking no comfort, “what would God want with a dead cat?”
Her father, her mother, all the people standing in a line back to Ozias Rudge and further; that crowd so long obliterated from her thoughts by the death of Vasile and the departure of Emil. She imagined her forebears coming for her. Would they accept the Gervasa infection? They’ll think I’ve gone lesbian, she thought with a small pleasure at the notion, just before she fell asleep in the chair.
The priest sat with her, praying the Prayers for the Dead, or so she imagined.
The “family” turned out to mean John Comestor. He’d arrived and checked in with the police the day before. The Mont-Saint-Michel security force had located him having croissants and coffee in some overpriced atmosphere-laden café. The priest and the gendarmes eyed him distastefully, as if suspecting him incapable of keeping Winnie from doing harm to herself. Many more words were suppressed than exchanged. The priest gave Winnie a blessing before they left. She shuddered and said, “You’re sweet, but don’t. It’s an affront.” With the pernicious myopia of the devout he didn’t seem to mind her tart tongue.
The younger gendarme winked at her. Bloody cheek, she thought, and caught herself reverting to Brit-speak, in this instance fake as all get-out, and knew it was a way of her sidestepping the assault of the wink. The redeeming, enlivening assault of it.
John arranged with the gendarmerie to have his own rental car returned. Then he wheedled the keys of the Renault Elf from Winnie and settled her in the passenger seat, going so far as to fasten her seat belt for her, as if she were five years old. Gervasa was turned, deep in, not sleeping, but batting at something, making fists against Winnie’s intestines.
After a while Winnie said, “How did you know where I was?”
John laughed. A nice laugh, obviously full of relief, perhaps that Winnie could speak in her own voice, at least a little. “If you can believe it, Ritzi Ostertag read some tea leaves. He decided to be firm about it. The auguries predicted some old place in Normandy, probably someplace high enough to leap from. And your friend Irv, a nice enough fellow, thought the antiquity of Mont-Saint-Michel would probably appeal to the storyteller in you. What with old Ozias’s connection to it, et cetera. It wasn’t all that hard to work out. He sent his love—and apologies, he made clear. I am to be sure to tell you.”
The car went on, the world flashed by, unspooling off its invisible pins.
She continued, “But why? Why did you bother? Any of you?”
“Not just for you. In case you’re thinking of feeling sentimental. I came on behalf of Mrs. Maddingly too. She is failing fast. They’ve cut her hair, you see, and she’s afraid her husband won’t recognize her when she arrives. She wants a traveling companion. She said she’ll take Gervasa with her when she goes, and save you the bother.”
Winnie had no way of knowing if this was John pandering to the loony in her or if he believed that such a transaction was possible. Maybe belief came in more than two varieties anyway, yes or no. The mucous membranes in her sinuses became swollen with moisture. “But,” said Winnie, “I don’t know if I can live anymore.”
“It’s sad,” agreed John, patting her hand like the brother he most nearly was, passing her a disagreeable handkerchief badly in need of laundering. “It’s all so very sad, but I’m afraid, you moron, you’re going
to have to try.”
They didn’t speak for an hour. The scenery of Normandy scrolled past in translucent slices, a pressed landscape of moss green undergrowth and spinneys of larch, of stone corbels and persimmon-colored tiles, and petrol stations in their antiseptic state of readiness for business.
In the Chunnel streaking back to London, a moan unfolded out of Winnie’s mouth. For the first time she did not know if it was Gervasa’s voice or her own. John held her hand cautiously until she withdrew it.
Then a cab through fiendish traffic, across the muscled river slatted with reflections: Christmastime in modern London, dusk. Winnie insisted that John sit in the rear-facing jump seats. She sprawled, recumbent, unable to care about looking ungainly. She thought she might be dying herself, and was curiously objective about it. For once she felt some relief from the itch that could be satisfied only by inserting a pen between her thumb and fingers and working it against ruled paper. How little is left when you die, even if you have scribbled and typed through the decades. Of old Ozias Rudge nothing in his own hand, only secondhand, hand-me-down stories of his life. Did his memories live, were they sacramentalized by Dickens, were they stolen by him and desecrated? It didn’t matter.
“A and E?” said the cabbie. Meaning Accident and emergency?
“Main entrance,” John said. “We’ll take our chances.”
John more or less kept her on her feet, at least as far as the elevator. There, as they were rising to the seventh floor, her system revolted against the affront to gravity. Her stomach lurched, and she sank to her knees. Very calm, the going out.
“Easy does it,” said John in an inaccurate John Wayne accent, hauling her up by force of will alone.
Breath stood still in Winnie’s lungs, resting, then walked again.
Mrs. Maddingly in no worse state than Winnie, by the look of things. She was tucked into her hospital linens so well that the sheet hadn’t lost its pleats. Her eyes were alert. Ritzi Ostertag was sitting beside her, knitting. At the sight of her visitors Mrs. Maddingly took pains to ready herself. She required Ritzi to apply the lipstick to her, achieving a lopsided effect more whoopsy-daisy than anything else. “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Maddingly at Winnie, “she’s in a sadder way than some, in’t she.” An older accent, from a childhood long paved over, was clawing through.
“She came to say good-bye,” said John.
“Who’s leaving who, is what the gossips want to know.”
The two old biddies on either side of Mrs. Maddingly were deep into their pudding and paid no attention.
“Come aboard, then, as you’re asked.” Mrs. Maddingly patted the sheet below her belly, remembering where a lap would occur if she were ever to sit up again to have one.
How to release Gervasa to her? An act of will?—but Winnie had no willpower any longer.
Ritzi took a vanilla-scented candle from his pocket. It was a freebie, a promo, the name of a candle supplier etched in gold on one side. He turned the advertisement to the wall and lit the wick. By candlelight, yes, and back again.
Where’s Jack the Ripper when you really need him? The life in her wanting to leave so badly, needing so much help. Needing a Dr. Kevorkian to midwife it.
The nurse came running in at the noise of her knocking over the side table. “She filled up on bubbly at lunch, she banged her head,” said John. Nice. From this position on the floor, her legs drawn up, Winnie couldn’t see the nurse, nor Mrs. Maddingly. Just the burnish of overwaxed linoleum and a paper cup that had rolled under the bed.
“Are you mad, bringing her up here? That one wants rescue. I’m ringing the lads downstairs for a gurney.” The nurse disappeared, giving every indication of relishing her brisk professional panic.
John held her hand. “Are you going to do it?” he said to her.
“I do believe we’re ready.” Mrs. Maddingly’s voice came from over the side of the bed. “Give you a piece of advice, dear. Dye your hair. That color. You look a proper cow, you do.”
“No advice,” said Winnie, having the nerve to speak, and breath to push it out.
Mrs. Maddingly’s hand fell to the side of the bed. Its palm opened up and its fingers moved, as if to beckon. And that was that.
Now this is this, or seems to be.
When you’re haunted by any variety of effective nonsense, like love or guilt or poetry or memory, which are anyway at their bitter root the same thing—the primary symptom is paralysis. You just can’t move.
Then, all too rarely, the virus is vanquished, the contagion concluded, the spell is broken, the cold front snaps in prismatic splinters. Bright moment, that, and bright moment, next, and so on and so forth. What returns is a sense of the present tense as being not only available, but valid.
So, some time later, Winnie boards a plane at Logan Airport in Boston. She is with Mary Lenahan Fogarty. They are on their way to Cambodia to collect the new baby. Malachy Fogarty is staying home so that one parent will be prepared in the right time zone to nurse the baby during the day until the other parent survives jet lag.
It is an amazing journey. Phnom Penh is twelve thousand miles from Boston. It is more Babylon than Babylon itself. Can I get there by candlelight? It is stretching a metaphor beyond acceptability to think like this, but Winnie has changed and not changed, and she thinks the way she likes.
They streak west. She sinks into a bleary haze due to the excitement. It occurs to her that, long as days can seem, this day is unnaturally long. Hour after hour they fly, over the Mississippi, over the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains. Then over the coastal vineyards, and out over the endless unchartable blue fields of the Pacific. Still it is light. And on again, and yet on, till Hawaii is just a shadow on the map beneath them, and Japan blooms ahead around the circumference of the earth. And still it is light. The sun is the biggest metaphor. The sun is the first candle. She can get there by its light.
It is new and old as Babylon. She hasn’t been able to picture it in advance. The steamy streets, the shabby genteel French provincial buildings, the wicker barber chairs at dusty curbsides. The Malay script across the doors of shops, a kind of ribbon candy folding out a message she can’t read. If there is one place in the world an orphan child can’t freeze to death, it is on the banks of the Mekong or the Ton Lap Rivers.
It is the rush hour. An ageless Khmer woman is riding sidesaddle on a moped behind her husband or brother. She holds the man’s waist with her left hand. Her right hand is elevated above her head. At first it looks like a queenly salute, but as Mary Lenahan Fogar-ty’s chauffeured car draws abreast of the moped, Winnie sees that the woman’s right hand is cradling a glass bottle filled no doubt with a sucrose solution. Holding it above the height of her heart. The IV drip tube sways in the jostle of traffic and slips into the starched sleeve of the woman’s blouse. Look, Mary, Winnie wants to say, but Mary has eyes only for the terrified child clinging to her shoulder.
At night, jet-lagged, Winnie hardly sleeps; she just hangs in slow motion, easing into the rest of her life. Her body is still urging itself along at 550 miles an hour, the ghostly law of inertia invoking itself—a body in motion remains in motion until some force acts against it.
The trip back is harder, of course. The baby is dosed with Benadryl to keep him soft and drowsy, but the week away, across a dozen time zones—as far away as you can get in the world before you begin to come back, despite yourself—well, time has taken its toll. Mary nods in sleep. Winnie watches the baby. His eyes are such ink black holes, it is hard to see the pupils within the irises. It is hard to know whether he can even see her.
Were Mary cognizant enough to pose a question just now, she might ask: So, Winnie, what gives? Is this a trial run so you can go solo next year? Or are you here just to observe? Or are you really here at all, in any way that matters?
But Mary needs her sleep.
She sat in a room somewhere. At her elbow, a notebook. A cup of tea steamed against the air. It clouded the window, letting only pallid
sunlight through. What was out that window? She couldn’t begin to imagine. If she leaned forward and cleared the glass with her hand, would she see him coming? At last? Him with his heart in his hands? She wondered.
For a moment she considered how she might have concluded the book that she would not write. In a ghost story worthy of its name, someone would have had to die. But who?
The page stayed blank. She made no mark.
By the time the lights of eastern Massachusetts grow recognizable, marking out early rush hour along the Mass Pike, Route 128, the JFK Expressway, Winnie is more or less awake and focusing. Who will be gathering down there? Adrian and Geoff, who have decided to do foster parenting in Massachusetts rather than an international adoption? Will they be leading a Forever Families support group to cheer Mary and the baby on their arrival? Malachy of course, breezy and ruddy with the shock of delight. Winnie will slip down the jetway on the sidelines, an escort, unnoticed, and that is as it should be. Will anyone else be waiting? Has enough time gone by? Will he be there? It matters and it doesn’t matter.
The 767 overshoots to the south to make the approach from the Atlantic side. The ocean is opaque. Attractively, Boston springs up like a film snip from the opening credits of a network news program, black silhouette of city skyline interrupted by a million windows. The city lights sparkle with human sentiment. The sky behind, higher up, bleeding the last of the sunset, is bright with disillusion.
Ω
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge these writers and publishers for permission to quote from the following works:
From Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, copyright © 1998 by The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.