The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (2 page)

Leontina had been good in English composition in her day.

Mr. Getchen stood up. “Pauline, get a move on if you know what’s good for you.” Mrs.

Getchen gaped at him as if he’d orchestrated all this.

Picked out by perspective, Tabitha appeared at the far end of an aisle. Her hands theatrically up on either side of her head, a pantomimed shrug you could have read through a beer glass. “What’s the matter, what are you
doing?”
she called. “I’m coming, okay?” Mrs. Scales let it rip some more. “I don’t know why in tarnation I put up with a bitch like you. Did you get your stupid music?”
Tarnation
was a choke cribbed out of her own mother’s mouth; Mrs. Scales hoped no one noticed.

Tabitha was all but sprinting. “Chill!
Chill,
will you?” She breezed past the few customers in line.

Mrs. Scales waited until Tabitha was right in front of her. She used as ordinary a voice as she could manage. “What a shame. Didn’t they carry the CD you wanted? Dear?”

“Forget it. I’m here. Let’s go. Are you mental? Are you, like, having sudden onset industrial menopause? Why are you doing this?”

“For the love of Christ.” Leontina passed her friends from church, who were staring palely at her. She hesitated. The teenagers had all clustered near the bottle deposit cash window as if ready to dive through it for safety in the event that Mrs. Scales was packing heat.

Empowered, Mrs. Scales raised her voice to them. “A little demonstration of contemporary slang. Would you like to hear me improvise—?”

“Mom.”

Some store manager had just turned the Muzak up three notches and was probably calling Jack Reeves over at the police station. “Well, next time, then,” said Mrs. Scales. She couldn’t resist adding, “Thank you for not listening.” She strode out across the mud mat. Tabitha skulked after.

The parking lot was a relief for them although, with her pulse racing, Mrs. Scales couldn’t keep track of the order for Inner Breathing.

“I was, like, dying of embarrassment. What’s the matter with you?”

“Well, honey.” She made a show of gripping her car keys in a way that suggested she could use them to gouge out her own daughter’s eyes if attacked. “Now you know how I feel when you use coarse language in front of my friends. It’s not a whole lot of fun. Is it.” Total silence in the car on the way home, which these days was the only way to escape Tabitha’s spontaneous profanity. But it was a start.

FOR T HREE DAYS Tabitha managed a civil tongue, but the ceasefire failed on Saturday night. She went out and didn’t come home till eight a.m. next morning. Welts on her arms, her clothes disheveled, a rubber Halloween mask of Richard Nixon slung onto the kitchen table like the head of John the Baptist or Holofernes. Its nose a half inch deep in margarine.

“Where have you been, young lady?” asked Mrs. Scales, swallowing back her alternative opening gambit,
Has some pervert deflowered my firstborn because he was turned on by the
thought of a cross-dressing Tricky Dick?

When she was ready to reply, Tabitha managed, “Bliss
out,
life is adventure, and after all, Halloween’s coming tonight, isn’t it? So go to Sunday service, and trick or treat already.”

“I need to talk to you about hymen integrity.”

“Mom, I’m not talking about anything till I zone out for a while. I’m, like, so wasted.” Leontina moved the margarine away from the rubber mask. “And you know Pastor Jakob forbids the children of the Cliffs of Zion Radical Radiant Pentecostal Church plastic masks and costumes. Disguises of all kinds promote dishonesty, and dishonesty is an open invitation to You Know Who. A recipe for trouble and no mistake. Though I gather you’ve been experimenting with making mistakes.”

Tabitha, letting out a laugh that yodeled into a shriek, impounded herself in the bathroom.

The water ran suspiciously noisy. “Are you weeping in there?” said Mrs. Scales, ear against the door. Her sons emerged from their separate dens, blinking and scratching like the animals they were. “Tabitha’s been out all night. I believe she’s been drinking, or
something,”
said their mother. “And I have to go to Meeting even if nobody else is, and I don’t want to leave her in this condition without you boys knowing.”

“She’s drinking? At this hour? Attagirl,” said Hogan, and went back to bed.

“I’ll fix her some coffee and find some aspirin, Mom,” said Kirk. “You go on to Meeting.

Go.
Go.”

She left feeling that she was living and driving a lie, with her car sporting the other new bumper sticker that said “Grace Happens.” Happens to whom? That’s what she wanted to know.

Maybe the bumper sticker was missing a line: GRACE HAPPENS TO VANISH.

Mrs. Scales tiptoed into Meeting with a red face. In this claustrophobic town, someone at Meeting would be ready to share new gossip about the Hussy of Thebes, Tabitha Scales. How much more shame could Tabitha heap upon her family? Was she aiming for an entry in
Guinness
World Records?

And—oh, but her mother could hardly tolerate thoughts at the clinical level—what yowls of pleasure or pain had Tabitha emitted at the infliction of those wounds? And that aroma of sex

… soft baby asparagus cut with a weak solution of Clorox. Despite her own clammy celibacy in that regard, currently, Mrs. Scales remembered the characteristics of intercourse all too well.

Leontina found it hard to focus during Pastor Jakob Huyck’s homily. She fretted with a frozen smile until the announcements, when Pastor Huyck reminded them, “The Radical Radiant Pentecostals and the Roman Catholics enjoy an unholy alliance. We share the parking lot between our buildings. And I’ve promised Father Mike Sheehy you won’t mow down any Catholics today. Prove me prophetic.”

Devotion yielded to committee sessions and study circles. Leontina Scales excused herself a few minutes early from the Inner Breathing class that Savitra Chanarinjee always called Remedial Prayer. She would set up the coffee for the break. She plugged in the twin Mister Coffees—or Misters Coffee, as Kirk would have it. (Mister Fastidious.) Then Leontina realized that what with her rage and worry she’d forgotten to stop and get 2 percent milk from the Stewart’s. What milk
did
lurk in the back of the Cliffs of Zion fridge was giving off an almighty odor. So Mrs. Scales prayed briefly for the courage to change the things she could, and she crossed the parking lot, weaving between Roman Catholic and Radical Radiant Pentecostal cars. She sneaked through the back door of the church of Our Lady Something or Other. (Our Ladies were like Barbies: new ones seemed to be issued annually.) She couldn’t find a light switch, but descended the stairs anyway. Overhead the folksy choir was insisting “All We Have We Give to You.” Mrs. Scales hoped that the sentiment extended to non-dairy creamer.

Mrs. Scales was a devout woman when the mood struck, and regularly on Sunday mornings the mood struck with some aggression. However, as she felt her way down to Our Lady’s kitchenette, she found herself wincing. Wurlitzer piety it was not.

What a week. Ruefully she remembered a few days ago, Tabitha waffling on about an Eye of God that had accidentally gotten unplugged somehow. A God that had suffered some sort of seizure and was cognizant but paralyzed. It was hard to imagine His Eye following her down these dark steps.

The argument this morning with Tabitha has thrown everything awry, thought Leontina. I can’t even begin to locate my Inner Breathing. My mind’s too worked up with Halloween images. A menace underneath the stairs. A creature in the dark. Slobbering its syllables together: OPEN YOUR MIND TO ME. Hackneyed, of course, B-movie quality at best, but better than OPEN YOUR LEGS.

But even that thought: a violation. She shuddered and wished she were the type to wear a Burberry scarf so she could clutch it now, but
uh-unh.
Not with the shoulders of a stevedore as her own mother, the redoubtable Ida Prelutski, used to point out. Honey, can’t you hunch a little and try to appear normal?

Open the door to worry, and look what happens: a junior assistant of Beelzebub tempts you to abhor your own firstborn child. Turn her into an embodiment of one of the deadly sins.

Plainly put—or in words that would have been plain enough in Ida Prelutski’s mouth—a floozy.

A strumpet. A tramp. A harlot. (Wasn’t there an eatery in that Syracuse mall called Harlots?

What were they thinking?)

Harsh words, these, but thinking them as she navigated the stairs of a Catholic church only made her descent the more alarming, as Mrs. Scales didn’t hold with religion of the Roman variety.

She paused for a minute in the dark. Halfway down and halfway up.

The stairwell proved exceedingly dark. There’d be a switch at the bottom, surely? Her thoughts returned to Halloween coming tonight—
your children will turn to beasts before your
eyes,
was that legitimate Biblical prophecy or was it a movie trailer voice-over? She was beset by beasts, the nameless kind. They had waited all her life to get her. All she’d ever wanted was to be free. But free, free of what? If you couldn’t name the beasts, see them, you couldn’t process your prayer request with any accuracy. Being a devoted study circlist has never helped me much, she thought.

She imagined marching to Tabitha and saying, “No more, young lady; out of my house.

In the sight of God I can be shamed by my own flesh and blood no longer. Get out. And take that severed head of Nixon with you.” She knew Tabitha would only snort some lewd reply.

She drew herself together—this is what happened when you didn’t sleep all night out of worry. You went stark raving un-Christian. And she a middle-aged pillar of the Radical Radiant Pentecostals. (Also Republican, with some standards.) Take a good look at yourself, she remonstrated. Behind enemy lines, sneaking into the Catholic stronghold.
During Mass.
Of course, I’ll replace the milk.

At length she made it to the bottom of the stairs without twisting an ankle. She still couldn’t find the switch, but the refrigerator—a Kelvinator dating to the last days of the Eisenhower administration, by the look of it—would probably feature a twenty-watt bulb in the ceiling panel inside the door. It did. The light came on just in time for Mrs. Leontina Scales to see a semi-retired statue of Our Lady with a Chip on Her Shoulder perched up top. It shifted, with a faint sound of grit giving way, and glissaded off the pockmarked appliance.

It was a heavy statue. It bounced against Mrs. Scales’s skull and then smashed to the linoleum. She registered that the noise was substantial, even thunderous, but that was all.

UPSTAIRS, THE CHIEF of the collection basket brigade, Turk Schaeffer, heaved himself from his kneeling position, made a perfunctory genuflection, and trudged off to investigate. Father Mike sat in his chair, eyes closed in contemplation of austere mystery.

Nearing the end of the third chorus, the choir stumbled since the music director, Jeremy Carr, remained paused, his head cocked as if expecting further tympanic crashes. Should they wait for his cue? Or continue on as they’d rehearsed? Under the lead of the loudest soprano, Peggy Mueller, the choir charged into the fourth verse, reminding Jeremy of his obligations to his all-volunteer army of would-be soloists. His arm started wagging again.

Turk Schaeffer found Mrs. Leontina Scales out cold in a puddle of full cream milk.

Shards of grayish porcelain were scattered around her. Turk, a retired lineman with Niagara Mohawk, had seen his share of accidents. He could tell that Mrs. Scales, whom he knew only to nod to when he ran into her at the Grand Union, wasn’t hurt bad. She was breathing. No blood pinked up the milk. But a lump the size of an eggroll pushed up through her thinning hair.

“Mercy, Turk, what’s up?” said Polly Osterhaus, an alto whom the choir director had sent downstairs, as backup. Altos were good in a crisis.

“I can take care of this,” said Turk.

“Is that Mrs. Scales from over on Papermill Road? What happened to her?”

“Our Lady took her out, looks like,” said Turk. “Polly, why’ncha go to the rectory and get the clinic to send someone over? And grab some ice from Father Mike’s icebox—this freezer has been out of commission since before Vatican II. And bring a towel.” He leaned and peered.

“And if you see a quart of milk, better bring that too. There’s nothing left for coffee hour, especially now that there’s something for everyone to hang around and yak about.” Polly Osterhaus felt Mrs. Scales’s wrist first. “Well, her pulse seems good. I guess she’s okay. You better not move her till the experts get here. Should I run across and interrupt the Radiantics at their seance? You think?”

“Not that serious, I’m guessing.”

Polly left. Turk mopped up the milk. When he took the woman’s head into his lap, the bump was growing a yellowy mauve-brown like an onion found at the back of the cabinet. His stomach lurched.

A taciturn man can be an observant man. Turk knew a few things about Leontina Scales, a few things he would rather not say. He didn’t want to wake up and find himself married to another Mrs. Turk Schaeffer anytime soon, though his first wife was dead these four years already. So with strictly charitable intentions he patted Leontina Scales’s forehead and the stiff, Brillo-paddy structure of her hair (reinforced by strategies enacted at Linda Pearl’s House of Beauty, no doubt; round this edge of Oswego County, women’s hair didn’t come by such an exoskeletal quality without the interventions of Linda Pearl). He hoped, for her sake, that Mrs.