Good to a Fault (24 page)

Tears splashed down Dolly’s poor face, and Paul put an arm around her and said idiotic comforting things: “Never mind, never mind, there are a hundred desserts here, you can make us another one, it’s only fluff, never mind.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Dolly kept saying, trying not to make any sobbing noise.

Clary was grateful that Dolly had not dropped the Waterford cake plate. Because then her mother would have appeared in a cloud of lightning to open the gates of Hell for Clary and the whole rag-tag set of clumsy gypsies who had invaded and pillaged her lovely house, leaving nothing undamaged. But the Waterford plate was safe, and her mother was safely dead.

Darwin still had Pearce, so Clary could catch her breath and put her arms around Dolly, making a sandwich of her with Paul. “It’s all right, really, it’s all right,” she said, kissing the top of her head. Trevor was scooping pieces
of torte off the floor and cramming them into his mouth. The youngest Newton child had brought a spoon from the dining room for a salvage feast.

The boys were interrupted by Candy Vincent, moving through the wreckage mopping at her suede pants with a cocktail napkin.

Clary said, “I’m terribly sorry, Candy,” and Candy turned her bulk towards them, her pale eyes finding Dolly. Clary felt sick, knowing she would have to defend Dolly, but for Paul’s sake not wanting any kind of a scene.

“You’ve done me a favour,” Candy told Dolly, not smiling, but calm. “These pants were killing me, and now I’ve got an excuse to run home and change.”

“Of course we’ll pay for the dry-cleaning,” Clary said, suddenly remembering Candy in Grade 7, going home in tears with a bloodstain on her skirt.

“Nope,” Candy said. “I’ve never liked them, and I’m going to throw them out. Good excuse to shop, Karl!”

Across the room her heavy husband laughed and rolled his eyes. “Go for it, Candy,” he called back. He was wearing a too-tight blue knit suit cut along rodeo lines, with pearl buttons. But Karl Vincent was kind. He was one reason to like Candy.

“Thank you,” Clary said quietly. “She was a little over-excited.”

Candy waved her hand and leaned closer to speak in Clary’s ear. “That grandmother is something, though.” She looked meaningfully at Clary. “Quite the tales she’s been telling.”

Mrs. Pell was still whooping away on the little couch. Who knew what wild lies she’d been confiding. She had Trevor snugged in beside her eating a slab of torte, ignoring the chocolate oozing onto her jacket. Clary would clean it for her anyway, of course, why should she worry?

Paul decided that the carpet was not cleanable, at least not in the middle of the party, and he asked Dolly to help him roll it up and take it to the basement. They let people step over them as they rolled, like a game of Twister. It was so light because it was such a cheap carpet, Paul explained.

“In fact,” he said, when they opened the basement door, “Let’s just consign it to the netherworld.” He tugged the whole thing out of Dolly’s grasp and slid it down the stairs. It was still so new that it didn’t even unfurl.

More people arrived even before the torte mess was cleared up. More
food was pulled out of the oven and people’s incoming arms, and replenished on the table and the rented plates. Everyone found people to talk to and other people they also wanted to talk to, and nobody had any axes to grind; or their axes were tucked away for the evening. Paul found himself introducing Mrs. Pell to everyone in the parish. She had never yet been to church and although he hoped professionally that she would receive the astonishing gift of the Holy Spirit, he could not help hoping she would experience the spirit in her own way at her own time, perhaps in the Temple that was the Great Outdoors. He thought he might have drunk a little too much of his adult punch, which had turned out very well. Darwin seemed to be enjoying himself too, whenever Paul caught a glimpse of him: listening to Frank Rich on the donor campaign, or getting Miss Tolliver to boast about her nephew the magician.

Clary, too, found herself enjoying the party. She and Iris Haywood ended up in the kitchen managing the endless stream of hot dishes people brought, and the equal torrent of things Paul had made. From time to time he remembered something and would dash back to find the champagne grapes at the back of the fridge, or the five fancy mustards for the ham. Then he would be ear-pinned away to the living room again by some other parishioner. Clary thought he looked happier than she’d ever seen him—he enjoyed entertaining. She liked his new shirt, and the nice red tie. She liked him so much.

Iris Haywood’s eldest daughter Ivy took Pearce in hand, walking him from room to room, keeping him happy. Bringing scalloped potatoes into the dining room Clary thought it was time for another diaper, but she gave Pearce a quick sniff, and he was fine. She hoped it was not Mrs. Pell who smelled. Something certainly did.

To atone for her disaster, Dolly gave herself the job of finding and stacking the dirty plates: Cinderella enough that she cheered right up. When Candy Vincent came back wearing a blue dress, carrying a bag of ice (“You’re psychic!” Iris Haywood said), Dolly felt able to slide off with the second-oldest Haywood girl, Francine, to sit on the stairs and talk about youth group, which they would be going to when they turned ten. Francine told her she had gone to a sleepover once and made the toilet overflow in the middle of the night, which was even worse than dropping the torte—the parents had to get up and all the other girls woke up too, it was so humiliating. It was a holy pleasure for Dolly to talk to such an established, clever, uncrippled girl. At
this party she was like that too. Francine wouldn’t let some weird guy grab his crotch at her. Although she would never go and die, Dolly thought she looked like Jane Eyre’s friend Helen. Her fair hair rippled over her shoulder and she sat sideways on the stairs with her shins neatly together, flowered tights under her black velvet dress: Dolly’s friend this evening. As perfect as Ann Hayter was pitiful, so that Dolly felt a stab of guilt.

Underneath them, close enough that Dolly could have reached through the banisters and touched the top of his gleaming bald head, Frank Rich—his Santa hat now on Mary Tolliver—told Paul that he had a lot to be thankful for.

“I know this must be a sad time for you what with the whole divorce thing,” Frank said, “But you have a lot of friends in this parish, and most of us are happy to see the backside of her.”

Paul found himself mesmerized by Frank’s bright, protruding, bloodshot eyes. Had he had too much to drink?

“Not that she was ever anything but polite to me, Reverend.”

How could Frank, a pillar of the church, forty years of service to the parish and the diocese, still not be able to grasp that Reverend was an honorific, not a name? Maybe no one had ever told him before.

“You know, Frank,” Paul said, and he could hear the rest of it already curdling in his mouth: “
I am not Reverend. Reverend is not a synonym for priest. Call me Paul, or Mr. Tippett, or Father Tippett if you like it High, or The Reverend Paul Tippett—
”

A strange, unsteady name, Tippett. Like himself. He smiled at Frank. “You know, I’m grateful for your sympathy, but I’m doing pretty well.”

He probably needed a drink himself, Paul realized. He felt a hand patting his head, and he reached up and touched it. Squeezed in beside Dolly on the stairs, Trevor smiled down at him.

“Want a ride?” he asked Trevor. Trevor climbed over the stair railing and onto Paul’s shoulders, and they stomped off to scare the ladies in the kitchen.

The Principal wasn’t scared. She handed Paul a glass of eggnog and gave Trevor children’s punch in a plastic cup, way up there in the air. Clary went to lift him down but Paul said “No, no,” and hung on to Trevor’s ankles. “He’s keeping my neck warm in this wintry weather.”

Trevor made his legs tight to hold on better and Paul pretended to gag, and then Clary did lift him down, but they didn’t spill one drop of the punch. Trevor slid back into the crowded room. The party was a forest of people, all burly bodies in rich clothes, pressed together at the top but thinner down below. If you were short enough you could get through the mass by crouching slightly. As he wandered by, Mrs. Pell told Trevor to fetch her a glass of the white wine. Darwin caught him carrying it back, holding it like the holy grail so he didn’t do a Dolly. Darwin filled it with ginger ale instead and let him carry it again.

Mrs. Pell glared at Darwin. Busybody. But she wasn’t too mad. Edith Varney was from Medstead, it turned out, and she knew people who had known Mrs. Pell’s sister Janet’s husband from Medstead, or at least his brothers.

More punch—when the girls wandered into the kitchen Clary set Dolly stirring the still-frozen orange juice while she searched for ginger ale. None left in the fridge. But Paul, coming in on a waft of music with a plate to refill, pointed Clary to the back porch for more pop in cartons, and then went with her through into the little passage between the kitchen and the back porch, where two doors stood closed, one to the porch and one to the basement.

In the suddenly darker quiet of the passage Clary leaned against the basement door so he could pass, and Paul could not pass by her. He looked into her face and leaned to see her better, to see her eyes, and then to kiss her.

His lips were cool and smoother than she’d thought and her chest contracted at the smell of his mouth, and then the taste of it, immaculate, and her arm fell around his shoulders and neck like Pearce’s arm around her neck. He pressed her against the door, their bodies intruding on each other. A rush of heat flooded up her body—although her mind was clear and surprised and calm, her body was ecstatic. The bones of his face were close beneath his skin. His hand touched her cheek. She felt that melding encroaching on her like dizziness, and tried to pull away. He stood back instantly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Oh no,” she said.

She tried to straighten up, and swayed, and he braced her waist. The molecules there too seemed to be merging, hand and body more than touching.

“Clary,” he said, as if he was satisfied with her name.

She smiled at him, half-smile splitting open, her whole self visible. She
must be blushing. She stretched her arms above her head and pulled at her hair and reached out to kiss him again, but the Haywood girl came rushing through, joyful, oblivious, running to get something from the back porch—some urgent unimportant rush that blew between them and brightened the hall from velvet darkness.

So Paul went out to the porch and got the ginger ale, and Clary went to find Pearce. He was sitting safely wedged on a church-hall chair between Sally King and Mrs. Rich, blathering gossip to each in turn.

“What a wonderful job you’re doing with this little fellow,” Mrs. Rich said when Clary swooped down on him. The parish must not have heard about the lice.

“He’s no work at all,” Clary said, and Sally King and Mrs. Rich both smiled at her like they knew
all
about it. Since they were both over sixty, Clary thought they had probably forgotten it, or most of it. She doubted that they’d missed a night’s sleep or a peaceful meal for many years. But she smiled back at them because after all, she was in their club, the club of women who have been with children. She stood breathing in the smell of Pearce’s neck. Did he need changing again? Nope. There was a definite smell, but not from Pearce. Maybe it
was
Mrs. Pell. But that was a new dress, new to her; Goodwill would have cleaned it.

She shifted Pearce, and he hid his head on her shoulder, face away from the ladies. Too much excitement. Children were overflowing through the party like a forgotten bathtub, the sugar in the punch beginning to tell. Cynthia Newton started rounding hers up and couldn’t find Kevin, so there was a general hunt upstairs and down. Dolly got the prize, finding him sound asleep behind a dining room curtain, propped against the window, sticky spoon in one hand and chocolate all over his chin.

Someone put John Coltrane on the stereo,
Giant Steps
, as people went out the door.

“When do you put up your tree, Reverend?” Frank Rich asked Paul on his way out the door. “I’ve got a couple extra marked out this year, when I bring in the tree for the hall, coupla weeks, I could drop one off for you too, if you’d like?”

Paul thanked him and wondered where the Christmas decorations were. In the rafters of the garage? Lisanne might have overlooked them. She and
the editor were going to the Mayan Riviera for Christmas. He advanced the CD a jab, to “Spiral.” She’d never give the box another moment’s thought, all those ornaments collected over all those years. One minute he was leaning into Clary in the back hall, and the next washed into sadness by a box of tinsel baubles that might not even be in the garage. Schrödinger’s Christmas cat.

Clary wandered through the rooms with Pearce on her hip, searching for Dolly, who was in the back porch with Francine. That would be nice, if that worked out. Better than that listless Ann Hayter, whose mother was too odd for comfort. When Clary had picked Dolly up last week Mrs. Hayter hadn’t seemed to remember that she was there. See how my charity only extends to the ones I care about, she thought. I don’t care at all about Ann Hayter, even if she’s in trouble, even if that household has something clearly wrong in it. “Time, Dolly,” she said. “We’ve got to get Pearcey home.”

Dolly did not complain, thank goodness—probably because Francine got up right away. The Haywoods kept strict discipline. Dolly and Francine said good night with some formality, respecting their long evening’s conversation.

“She’s going to ask her mom if I can come for lunch on Sunday,” Dolly told Clary, who was busy keeping her heartbeats from going crazy, and hardly heard. Paul had kissed her, right there.

“I think she’ll let me, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, probably,” Clary said, wondering what she was agreeing with, pressing her free hand to her chest to stop that quaver in the breath.

Out in the kitchen a posse of women were cleaning up, leaving the place spick and span. If Lisanne had still been there the women wouldn’t have done it, Clary thought, with a moment’s temporary sympathy for her. But of course she would have bristled if anyone but Paul had tried to help, and scoffed at him. Impossible. Possible. Her cheeks went hot again. This was annoying. She went through the kitchen arch, stalking Mrs. Pell. There she was, all alone in purple splendour on the dark loveseat. Looking old and a little the worse for wear, but she had been comparatively unexceptional all evening. As she struggled to her feet, Mrs. Pell said, “That settle’s comfortable enough but there’s something dirty inside it. You’d think a minister would have a cleaner house.”