The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (24 page)

“Oh, Jeremy, there you are. Some client of yours showed up, some music thing, but something’s come up and I’m afraid—”

“I heard. I’ll change my plans.”

“A bit of counseling,” said Father Mike, in the sanctity-of-the-confessional voice he had that, Jeremy always thought, was a trifle wistful, as if it was a burden not to be able to complain about Peggy Mueller just a little. Jeremy patted him on the shoulder and said, “Better you than me. See you later.”

“Will we call it off?” asked Irene. “I hate to miss the opportunity. With Christmas coming everything will get so crazy.”

“It’s all piano stuff, isn’t it,” said Jeremy. “Sheez. Now that it’s getting on to winter, it’s too cold to hang out in the church except on Sunday when the heat’s on. Look, I’ve got an idea.

Why don’t you jump into my car and we’ll go see if we can barge in to this other rehearsal space I’ve been using lately. I can run you back to Monroe afterward, or wherever.”

“I can hang around and wait,” said Willem. “I don’t mind.”

“You have little kids you need to read Dr. Seuss to.” Jeremy’s voice was firmer than he expected. What a jolt, to be the one calling quits to an unanticipated rendezvous. He watched Willem shrug and touch a pair of fingers to his heart as if crushed.

“Suit yourself. See you later, Irene.” Was it only Jeremy’s imagination that Willem drove away looking the tiniest bit chagrined?

Probably. But Irene chattered, banal and personable, so Jeremy was spared the chance to obsess about it.

They pulled up in the drive of the convent of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries.

“Ghoul Central,” said Irene. “Are we going to practice wedding marches or wedding dirges?”

“Hold your fire,” said Jeremy. He should have called first, but an acid light seethed in the kitchen and since it was only 7:15 he decided to risk a little wrath and ring the bell. The small window in the vestibule door opened only after a considerable pause, and anxious Sister Felicity stood there, peering over the bottom of the window. “Mercy, is that you?” Jeremy doubted she recognized him.

“Jeremy Carr, from the church. I know I said we weren’t coming because Sean is under the weather, but it’s our regular night and I had another thought, so I thought—”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” muttered Sister Felicity, and went to work on the bolts.

“What’s all this about, then?” she said, when the door swung open.

Jeremy introduced Irene Menengest and explained the situation. Sister Felicity looked dubious. “I’m just burning a little toast and scalding a little milk for the insomniacs among us,” she said, implying that the nuns had been abed for hours already. “I hardly think I have the liberty to admit you, Jeremy, without Mother Clare du Plessix’s permission.”

“I could call Sister Alice, perhaps?—”

“Sister Alice would be too busy to answer the phone. And she may have a lot of responsibility for us decaying old things, but she doesn’t have much authority, I’m afraid. That’s her cross.” She looked as if she thought Sister Alice’s cross not quite crushing enough. “Oh come in, it’s just us chickens and if you kill us all in our beds, we’re one night closer to Jesus, that’s all I can say.”

“Did you have a good Thanksgiving, Sister Felicity?” said Jeremy.

“Are you talking spiritual nourishment or corporal cuisine? I don’t do the holidays well, I get a string of migraines from the strain. Sister Alice might have seen fit to join her community on that day of gratitude, but she apparently had commitments elsewhere.” Jeremy didn’t let on that he’d seen Sister Alice cook for the needy; he guessed that Sister Felicity wouldn’t know how to interpret his favorite bumper sticker, “Put the fun back in dysfunctional.”

“There was some light meat and dark,” said the nun, “there was squash and a pie and some real half-and-half for our decaf, and we considered ourselves lucky for it.” Irene Menengest gave Jeremy a look that said, Oooh, what a bitter little ferret. Jeremy pretended not to comprehend. “We need maybe forty minutes or an hour, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I won’t make a practice of this, but we’ve a kind of emergency. Irene is a soprano—”

“—mezzo—” supplied Irene.

“I see,” said Sister Felicity. Was the old nun irritated about Irene’s being a woman instead of one of the guys? Maybe Sister Felicity felt upstaged by a fat strawberry blond in a thick coat with peasant stitching and buttons made out of hack-sawed slices of deer antlers.

Jeremy supposed even old nuns could succumb to the temptation of regret about their lost looks.

Everyone else did.

“Sing away, don’t mind if I ignore you,” continued Sister Felicity. “I’ll have to go up to tell Mother Clare so that nobody thinks they’re hallucinating Joan-of-Arc voices. But frankly there’s enough rampant loss of hearing among us that people will probably assume you’re the radiator clanking. Let’s try it and see.” She allowed herself a wintry smirk as she closed them into the sunroom.

“Wow, that’s some welcome,” said Irene.

“Shall we get started? What have you got?”

They had gone through several hymns, with Jeremy transposing everything into B flat as Irene’s pleasant voice had a limited register, when Sister Felicity reappeared with the rolling cart and a small treat laid out on a paper towel. She’d folded the edges of the towel and cut it with a scissors to make a design, as if Jeremy and Irene were second grade children having a party to celebrate making it through the primer. “Oh, you needn’t have done this,” said Irene. “My figure.”

“I can see you don’t worry much about that. Just a little shortbread and some of that zinger tea. Mother Clare said to.” Sister Felicity looked as if she doubted Mother Clare’s mental competence, but obedience was obedience. “I can’t stay and chat, I’m afraid; I’m behind in my evening devotions. Jeremy, Mother Clare said I may allow you this once to let yourself out when you’re done. She hopes you will conclude by nine.”

“Oh, for sure,” said Jeremy. “I’ve got to pick up Marty Rothbard at the Craftique at nine, and get Irene home before that. No problem.”

When Sister Felicity had gone, Irene said, “She looks like Cloris Leachman in
Young
Frankenstein.
Who are these strange creatures? Where do they come from? What do they want?”

“They want company. She’s secretly devoted to me, I’m guessing. She’s just skilled at not showing it after so many decades of denial.”

“Oh, her too?” said Irene.

Jeremy stifled a fake yawn. He hoped it wasn’t common knowledge in the Handelaers’

extended family that he was Willem’s cast-off everybody-tries-it-once-in-college gay fling. “I don’t know much about Polly’s boyfriend, have you met him? Caleb Briggs?”

“He’s a bit backwoods, I think. I met him once or twice. It’s a little sudden and I hope Polly doesn’t regret it, but she is
such
a Catholic, you know. Don’t you find being religious a tremendous liability? I mean, it’s almost 2000. We have civil liberties these days.” He shuffled some music. “Frankly, the worst part of being a church musician is you have to talk about it all the time. Everybody treats you like you’re some sort of pariah. For me being Catholic is just like being—well—an upstate New Yorker, or a college graduate, or a musician.

It’s just one of those things.”

“And all these women here buying into the patriarchal hog-wash.” Irene made a motion with her hand. “Talk about the snow job of the millennium.”

“Well now, that’s a little harsh. You going to dismiss all the lives of all these women, and all the women in their communities in all those different countries over all those different centuries, just because you don’t happen to like the pope? How many of them over the centuries had much in the way of choices? When really, think about it—proto-feminists, kind of—living in community, sharing everything they had, living simply and off the land—” Irene was looking at him dubiously. “You really belong in the Nineteenth century,” she said. “Can we take that from the top, or do you feel the need to do some more defending of the faith?”

“You brought it up. I get tired of my own personal beliefs being everybody’s business,” he snapped.

“You’re in the business,” she reminded him. “They pay you.”

“You object so much, you could refuse to sing in a church wedding.”

“And you’re accompanying me—how cheerful would the Church have been if anything had ever come of you and W—”

He slammed the lid to the piano keys down and counted to ten, then opened it again. “I’m at measure 18. One and two and breathe and—”

“Don’t take it personally,” she said in outrageous calm.

“Yeah, religion’s not personal at all. Remember to breathe. We modulate at measure forty-two.” His hands capered. The F above C2 rang sharp as tarnish. The tang of red zinger tea was being subsumed into an older, resentful smell of cabbage. Willem hadn’t needed to cave so easily when Jeremy told him to leave. He could’ve insisted on coming along. I could have shown him off to Sister Felicity. I hadn’t gotten to show him off to anyone except my father, that one time, by accident, and that gay waiter at the Polish café in Watertown who insisted on snapping our picture.

At measure forty-two Irene remembered to modulate but Jeremy didn’t.

TABITHA WAS IN the back room rinsing out the combs in blue sterilizing fluid. She always felt she was on some Saturday morning science show with organs in bottles, or little fetuses in formaldehyde, especially when she remembered to wear the white coat. A standard sucky early December day; the spitting wet might have been snow, but wasn’t. Still, at least the place was quiet. What old witch was going to pay to have her hair done only to have it get rained on or blown out as she hobbled back to her car where her dead husband sat turning the pages of the free classifieds, waiting for her?

When Linda Pearl Wasserman came into the back room and slapped the door closed, a moldy clamminess seemed to follow in her wake. She looked at Tabitha with alarm verging on glee. “Oh God, what do I do now.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tabitha.

“She’s out there. The one. Your enemy. Caleb’s fiancée.”

“Linda Pearl. I know I’m a basket case but I’m actually trying to get over this and you’re not making it any easier.”

“Easy for you to say.
I’ve
got the girl in the front chair. She just wants a quick wash and set today, and is asking for advice on a hairdo for early January.
For her wedding.”
Tabitha began to get interested despite herself. “What, you’re going to sabotage her?

Make her look like a concentration camp survivor?”

“Do I have to spell everything in capital letters? She’s there in the chair, she’s trapped like a—like a gerbil—what do you want to know? Girl, I’m here for you.” She grabbed Tabitha’s hands. “I live to help those in agony. Put me to work. I could wheedle state secrets out of, um, any big shot who came in here for a blow-dry.” She tried again. “Mrs. Hilarious Clinton, for one.

Now that she says she’s going to run for senator from New York, if she campaigns around here and comes in for a photo-op I’ll find out the truth about what she really puts in Bill’s home-baked cookies.”

“Well.” Tabitha drew her hands back and made a show of drying them on the towel. She didn’t like Linda Pearl to touch her. It was like shaking hands with a blob of defrosting pizza dough. “I guess you could find out how Caleb and her got engaged?”

“I’m all over it.” She paused.
“Tabitha.
Do I have to do everything? I have a career in hair management, and I have to be an advice columnist too? You cretin. Listen: I’ll find out where your Caleb is and I’ll keep this Polly dolly in the chair and
you can go get him.
Thought you’d put up more of a fight. Frankly.”

“I’ve had the fight knocked out of me by my mother.” But was Linda Pearl on to something? Pastor Huyck had told Tabitha to face her demons down, to find Caleb and release him to his future, and liberate herself to her own. Or something like that. So maybe Linda Pearl, twitching with zeal at espionage of the heart, was being a messenger of God. The Angel of the House of Beauty.

Tabitha sighed. “Well, leave the door open and I’ll come out behind the screen and listen.

But Linda Pearl, don’t slit her throat or do a buzz cut or anything. Not yet. If we want to do that it’d be better when she comes in the day before the wedding. Right?”

“The soul of normalness,” said Linda Pearl in a testifying way. She locked eyes with Tabitha, sisters together on the Bitch Brigade, and she coursed out of the back room, fluting,

“Coffee? Tea? Diet Shasta Cola?”

It didn’t seem right to Tabitha that she should feel older than Linda Pearl when she was twelve years younger. But since she now felt older than her mother, maybe this was turning into a permanent condition. She hoped not. Lately her mother had taken to lying on top of her bed every night in her coat and boots, clutching the only pocketbook she had that would accommodate the Bible. She slept with all the lights on and woke herself every three hours, crying. Tabitha was reduced to dozing on the sofa so that she could leap to her mother’s doorway and say coldly, “It’s just a dream, Ma, wake up and go to sleep,” which seemed to help.

But Tabitha wasn’t getting a whole lot of rest, which made the world go streaky from time to time, as if it had been Windexed and not dried properly.

Bleary or no, it was still the world, and it harbored Caleb out there—that oak-necked traitor, that turncoat. The second Catholic wannabe of the season. It was funny how the world seemed smaller and less deliberately set on its pilings these days. How quickly things could change. One moment, Mom could be her old salt-of-the-earth self, Leontina Scales, running up potholders on her faithful Singer sewing machine with the treadle and the wheel to raise money for the Pentecostal missionaries in Ecuador or Peru or some other part of Africa. The next moment she was no better than a crazy Catholic lady escaped from the loony bin. How the world could shiver when it wanted. All the earthquakes weren’t on the West Coast. Linda Pearl put her faith in hair fashions but Tabitha was finding this wasn’t quite enough. Nothing was quite enough.