Stillness in Bethlehem (5 page)

Now Susan put aside the green felt Christmas tree she had been plastering with glitter balls—the felt decorations were for the children’s wing of the hospital over in Hanover; the town always used its extra materials to make ornaments for the chronic ward and the ICU—and picked up a spool of bright pink thread. Then she shook her short gold hair, shot Sharon a look it was impossible for Sharon to miss, and said, “It’s precisely because she’s only one person that she has a case. That’s what the Bill of Rights is all about. Protecting the rights of the individual against the will of the majority.”

“Rights,” Betty Heath said slowly. She put down Balthazar’s robe and reached for the next bit of emergency sewing on her table, a sky-blue angel’s costume whose hem had begun to drag. “I don’t get all that about rights. I have rights, don’t I? And so does everybody else in town. I don’t see why Tisha’s are the only rights anybody has to think about.”

“They aren’t,” Susan said patiently.

“Well, they sound like they are. Peter Callisher coming here all upset like that and saying we’re not going to get to put on the Celebration anymore. I’ve known Peter Callisher all his life. He never behaves like that.”

“He was pretty upset,” Susan said noncommittally. She shot Sharon another look, and Sharon smiled. Peter Callisher had not been “pretty upset” when he’d blown through on his way out to Stu Ketchum’s. He’d been foaming at the mouth when he wasn’t breathing fire. He’d been so hot that Sharon imagined she could still feel the heat, twenty minutes later. She looked at the big institutional clock on the back wall and saw that it said quarter to nine. Peter had probably made it out to Stu’s by now and been calmed down. Sharon thought that was too bad. Tish Verek could use a good talking-to by somebody who wasn’t in control of himself at all, and not just because of this silly injunction. Sharon didn’t really believe that the injunction would shut down the Celebration, now or ever. Too much depended on the Celebration’s going on. Too many people counted on the money it brought in. Where Tisha was really a danger was in her penchant for creating discord and the tactics she used to get it moving. Tisha hinted, that was the problem. She hinted about Sharon and Susan, knowing just how delicate a balance their lives were. She hinted about other things, too, that could not possibly be true. Lately she’d been picking on poor fat Timmy Hall, saying he reminded her of someone, flashing around that picture she had of the boy who had killed all those people in a swimming pool. It would serve her right if Timmy turned out to be far less placid than he looked.

The gold felt Christmas bell was finished. Sharon tossed it into the box she and Susan were using to transport the things and said, “It won’t really matter this year anyway. She didn’t start soon enough to shut the Celebration down. And between this year and next, there’s an awful lot of time for things to happen.”

“An awful lot of time for her to hire more lawyers,” Betty Heath said. She adjusted her glasses, poked at her thinning and badly dyed brown hair, and stabbed hard at the hem of the angel’s gown. “I never liked either one of them, not since they came here. Building that silly house that looks like it’s going to fall down any minute, and then that man talking to the newspapers about all that nasty sex. That’s all people think about anymore, you know, sex. It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. We had interests. Now all people want to do is go to court and go to bed, and I can’t see much difference between the two except you do one of them naked. Oh, I’m sorry, dears, I didn’t mean anything. Of course you wouldn’t know about any of this. You’re both much too nice to know anything at all about that sort of thing.”

“Right,” Susan said, blanching a little.

Sharon grabbed a piece of red felt cut into the shape of a leaping reindeer and bent her head over it.

Betty Heath leaned forward to look out the window onto Main Street and said, “Oh, there’s Dinah Ketchum. She must be on her way over to the barn. I’ve got to get hold of her.”

“Go right ahead,” Susan said.

“We’ll be fine on our own for a few minutes,” Sharon said.

“Take your time.”

Betty Heath looked doubtful. “If you’re sure,” she said slowly. “I really do have to talk to Dinah. It’s important. But there’s so much work to do here, and there’ll be more coming in…. You know what it’s like on the day the Celebration opens.”

“Awful,” Susan agreed.

“Horrific,” Sharon echoed. “That’s why you shouldn’t put off anything important. There’s nothing to say you won’t be even more swamped later than you are now.”

“Well,” Betty Heath said, “there is that.”

Susan took her firmly by the arm and began to guide her to the steps leading up to the foyer and the door to the outside. “Of course there’s that,” she said. “What do you take us for?”

“Take you for?” Betty looked bewildered.

“Mrs. Ketchum just went into Heckert’s Pharmacy. If you hurry you can catch her before she comes out.” Susan flung open the door to the stairs, pushed Betty through it and stood back. Betty got up four or five risers and then looked down again, undecided.

“Well,” she said.

“Go,” Susan said.

“All right,” she said. And with that, Betty Heath brightened, turned and began to hurry up the stairs—or came as close to hurrying as legs with veins like that could manage. Susan Everman watched her until she reached the landing and then shut the basement door.

“Well,” she said. “That got her out of the way. What do we do now?”

It was exactly what Sharon Morrissey had been wondering herself, all the time that Betty Heath had been hesitating about running out to meet old Dinah Ketchum—and all the time before that, too, ever since Peter Callisher had come bombing in with the news. She watched Susan flit back and forth in front of the narrow table, her fine-boned body moving like a dancer’s or a model’s, her perfectly chiseled face a vision out of some expensive photographic artist’s portfolio of seminal work. Sharon Morrissey was not like that and never would be. She was too thick and athletic and awkward, too much like what a lesbian was
supposed
to be. Susan was the kind of lesbian men were always offering to fix.

“Susan,” Sharon said, “I’ve been thinking about it. About Tish.”

“So have I.”

“Well,” Sharon said. “What do you think? How dangerous do you really suppose she is?”

“More dangerous than she knows she is,” Susan said decisively. “
Very
dangerous to us, if that’s what you meant.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“It’s not as if everybody in town doesn’t know,” Susan said slowly. “It’s not that we’ve been keeping it a secret. We were smarter than that this time.”

“We were bowing to the inevitable,” Sharon told her.

“There’s nothing wrong with bowing to the inevitable if it gets you where you want to go. And as for the other thing—”

“Right,” Sharon said. “The other thing.”

Susan came to a halt and put her hands down on the narrow table right next to the nylon ribbons. “As for the other thing,” she repeated, “I’m sure Tish couldn’t know—well, anything. She really couldn’t. But I worry.”

“So do I.”

“So I think that this might be the perfect time. Don’t you agree? We could go up there and—and look around. See what she’s got in plain sight. Of course, if the information’s on a computer, we couldn’t do anything about that, but you know Tish. All those pictures she carries around. And those corkboards it talked about in the paper. There might be something.”

“Yes,” Sharon said solemnly. “There might be something.”

“And if there was something, we’d finally know what we had to do.” Susan sounded decisive at last. She bent at the waist to get a better look out the window onto Main Street. “Betty Heath’ll be gone for a while,” she said, “and we wouldn’t be conspicuous. If anybody saw us leaving town, we could just say we were going out to the house. It’s on the same road. And with Peter Callisher and Stu all worked up and half the town worked up with them, I’ll bet there’s going to be a convention up there this morning anyway. Lots of people out to stop Tish. Lots of people milling around that house. Lots of—cover. No one would ever guess.”

“Mmm,” Sharon said.

“Never mind,” Susan said. “Get your coat. If we don’t get out of here before Betty gets back, we
will
have a problem.”

To Sharon Morrissey’s mind, they already had a problem—a problem that might or might not have been discovered by Tisha Verek—but that was almost beside the point. One of the things that had made Sharon Morrissey happy when she first realized she was a lesbian was the possibility that she would never fall in love again in that dizzying, sickening, soul-abandoning way she had when she had fallen in love with men. Then Susan had come along, and Sharon had realized not only that love hadn’t changed, but that it had gotten worse. The addition of passion to the rest of the symptoms was enough to make her choke.

Sharon Morrissey had spent a great deal of her life before coming out in therapy, and even after all these years she could hear the sound of her therapist’s voice, telling her just what he thought of the way she fell in love.

It didn’t matter.

Sharon Morrissey was one of those people for whom the world was either well lost or not lost at all, and she wasn’t about to change into a creature of logic and reason at this late date.

It was ten minutes to nine by the time Candy George got to rehearsal, and by then she was probably the only person in Bethlehem who hadn’t heard that Tisha Verek was on her way to file an injunction in the federal circuit court that would shut the Nativity Celebration down. Candy hadn’t heard for the same reason she never heard everything—because in spite of the fact that her house was within walking distance of the town library, her husband Reggie had arranged things so the two of them might as well have been in Kathmandu. Candy wasn’t entirely sure where Kathmandu was. She hadn’t been too great in geography, or in anything else, either, when she was still in school. She did know that Kathmandu was far away and not on the local telephone exchange. There was something about the name that caught at her. Boston, New York, even Montpelier, all seemed impossibly exotic and far away. When Reggie got like he got and things went really bad, Candy couldn’t imagine hitching a ride to the nearest Greyhound station and getting on a bus. She couldn’t imagine using her little plastic bank card to take the fare out of the account she shared with Reggie. She couldn’t imagine much of anything. When Reggie got really, really bad, Candy got confused, so confused she couldn’t remember where she was or who she was with. It all seemed to come together somehow: Reggie and her father; Reggie and her stepfather; Reggie and Reggie; beaten beaten until the blood flowed on the screen porch out at the farm; beaten beaten until the blood flowed in the storeroom at the pharmacy; beaten beaten until the blood flowed on the brand-new sheets from Sears Reggie had bought her to go along with their brand-new bedroom suite. First Candy got confused and then she got depressed, because there didn’t seem to be anything else but this. Sometimes she wondered about the women she saw on television. Where did they get hit? How did they keep the bruises from showing? What did they get hit for? Lately Reggie had taken up a new and terrifying hobby. He’d brought home a lot of leather straps from a sex store in Boston and started tying her to the bed. He’d brought home a lot of leather whips, too, and what he did with those Candy wouldn’t think about even when it was happening. Her head ached almost all the time now, and she thought her life was over. She had turned seventeen years old exactly two weeks, four days, and twenty-two hours ago.

The rehearsal was being held in the auditorium in the basement of the Episcopal Church. The town had been talking about building an auditorium to hold the Nativity play in for several years, but never got around to it. Candy went down the back steps and through the back basement door and into the locker room. Then she took off her jacket and hung it on one of the hooks that lined the wall. As soon as she was free of the jacket, she felt better. She took in the multicolored tinsel garlands the Episcopal Church ladies had strewn around on everything and the pictures of the Christ Child in the manger done by children in the Sunday School. When the committee had first approached her about taking the part of Mary in this year’s Nativity play, Candy had been sure that Reggie would make her refuse. He wouldn’t even let her get together for lunch with the girls who’d been bridesmaids at her own wedding. Then there was her mother, whom Reggie hated. If Candy never saw her mother again as long as she lived, Reggie would be only too pleased. That was why it had come as such a shock when he had taken to the idea of her being Mary, wearing a pale blue robe and talking somebody else’s words in front of strangers for three weeks straight. It had tickled him in a way Candy couldn’t explain. It was as if it was something he had done himself, that he had a right to be proud of. When Candy dared, she resented it. It was something that had come to her and that she wanted to keep for herself alone.

Of course, Reggie wasn’t about to let things get out of hand. Since rehearsals for the play had started, he had upped the frequency of his rages, moved their game just a little farther out on the way to out of control, done everything he could to let her know that she would die without him. She was beginning to think she would die with him. This morning she hurt so badly she could barely walk, and it was a condition that was only going to get worse. She could feel the hot on her kneecaps and high up on the insides of her thighs. Reggie was different from Candy’s father in many ways, but most of all in this one. Candy’s father hadn’t cared a damn about who saw Candy’s mother black and blue. Reggie was always extra careful to hit Candy where it wouldn’t show, and once—when it had been all over for the night and she had been curled up on their new Dupont Stainmaster bright green carpet, trying too hard to breathe—he had told her that he always hit her in ways that would keep anyone she complained to from being able to prove it. That little lecture had been more than confusing. It had been hallucinatory. Who did he think she was going to complain to? And what would she complain about?