Bear and His Daughter

MISERERE

MARY URQUHART had just finished story hour at the library when the muted phone rang at the circulation desk. She had been reading the children Prince Caspian.

Camille Innaurato was on the line and as usual she was beside herself.

“Mary, Mary, so listen…” Camille began. It sounded almost prayerful. Then Camille began to hyperventilate.

“Oh, Camille,” Mrs. Urquhart said. “Try to be calm. Are you all right, dear? Do you have your inhaler?”

“I have more!” Camille croaked fiercely at last. The force of the words in her constricted throat made her sound, Mary Urquhart thought, like her counterpart in Traviata.

“More?” Although Mary knew at once what Camille meant, she needed the extra moment of freedom.

“More babies!” Camille shouted. She spoke so loudly that even with the receiver as close to her ear as she could bear, Mary Urquhart thought that everyone around the circulation desk must be able to hear her voice on the phone, its unsound passion.

“My brother, he found them!” cried Camille. “And he took them here. So I got them now.”

“I see,” said Mary Urquhart.

Outside, Mrs. Carter; the African-American head librarian, was supervising the reuniting of the story-hour children with their mothers. The children were, without exception, black and Hispanic. The mothers of the black children were mostly West Indian domestics; they were the most scrupulous of the story-hour mothers and they loved their children to have English stories, British stories.

“Mary…” Camille gasped over the phone. “Mary?”

Outside the library windows, in the darkening winter afternoon, the children looked lively and happy and well behaved and Mary was proud of them. The mothers were smiling, and Mrs. Carter too.

“Easy does it,” said Mary Urquhart to her friend Camille. For years after Mary had stopped drinking, she had driven around with a bumper sticker to that effect. Embarrassing to consider now.

“You’ll come, Mary? You could come today? Soon? And we could do it?”

The previous year Mrs. Urquhart had bought little books of C. S. Lewis tales with her own money for the children to take home. That way at least some might learn to read them. She liked to meet the mothers herself and talk with them. Looking on wistfully, she wished herself out on the sidewalk too, if only to say hello and remind herself of everyone’s name. But Mrs. Carter was the chief librarian and preempted the privilege of overseeing the dismissal of story hour.

“Yes, dear,” Mary said to Camille. “I’ll come as soon as we close.”

They closed within the hour because the New Jersey city in which Mary worked had scant funds to spare for libraries. It was largely a city of racial minorities, in the late stages of passing from the control of a corrupt white political machine to that of a corrupt black one. Its schools were warrens of pathology and patronage. Its police, still mainly white, were frequently criminals.

Mary Urquhart looked carefully about her as she went out the door into the library parking lot for the walk to her old station wagon. It was nearly night, though a faint stain of the day persisted. At the western horizon, across the river and over the stacks and gables of the former mills, hung a brilliant patch of clear night sky where Venus blazed. Some of the newer street lights around the library’s block were broken, their fixtures torn away by junkies for sale to scrap dealers. There were patchy reefs and banks of soiled frozen snow on the ground. Not much had fallen for a week, but the weather was bitter and the north-facing curbs and margins were still partly covered.

“Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,” Mary recited silently to the first star. She could not keep the line from her mind.

Temple Street, the road Mary drove toward the strip that led her home, was one of crumbling wooden houses. In some of them, bare lights glowed behind gypsy-colored bedspreads tacked over the taped windows. About every fifth house was derelict and inside some of these candlelight was already flickering. They were crack houses. Mary had worked as an enumerator in the neighborhood during the last census and, for all its transience, she knew it fairly well. Many of the houses were in worse condition inside than out. The official census description for all of them was “Dilapidated.” A few of her story children lived on the street.

The odd corner had a bodega in a cinderblock building with a faint neon beer sign in its window. The cold had driven the brown-bagging drinkers away from the little strip mall that housed Mashona’s Beauty Shoppe, a cheap lamp store and a takeout ribs joint called Floyd’s, which kept erratic hours. All the shops closed at dusk and God knew, she thought, where the alcoholics had gone. Maybe out of the bitter wind into the crack houses. Mary knew a lot of the older alcoholics who hung out there by sight and sometimes, in daytime, she stopped for Floyd’s ribs, which were not at all bad. Floyd, who always had a smile for her, kept a sign over his register that read CHRIST IS THE ANSWER.

She had an ongoing dialogue with a few of the men. Those who would speak to a middle-aged white woman like herself called her “Mary” and sometimes, in the case of the beat old-timers from down home, “Miss Mary.” She had begun by addressing them all as “sir,” but she had soon perceived that this offended them as patronizing and was not appropriate to street banter. So, if she did not know them by name, she addressed them as “guy,” which amused them. It was how her upper-class Southern husband had addressed his social equals. He had used it long before one heard it commonly; he had been dead for thirteen years.

“I know your story, guy,” she would say to a brown-bagging acquaintance as she carried her paper container of ribs to the car. “I’m a juicehead. I’m a boozer.”

“But you gotta enjoy your life, Mary,” an old man had said to her once. “You ain’t got but one, chere?”

And that had stopped her cold.

“But that’s it,” she had told the man. “You’re so right.”

He had shaken his head, telling her really, well, she’d never understand. Her life and his? But she’d persisted.

“That’s why I don’t have my bottle today as you do. Because there was a time, guy. Yes, you best believe it.”

Then he’d heard her vestigial Southernness and cocked his head and said, in a distinctly sarcastic but not altogether unfriendly way, “Do it right, Mary. You say so.”

“God bless, guy.”

“Be right, Mary.”

Poor fellow, she’d thought. Who was he? Who might he have become? She wished him grace.

A short distance before Temple Street doglegged into the strip of Route 4, it passed the dangerous side of a city park in which there was a large lake. The cold weather had frozen the lake to a depth that Mary knew must be many feet. After the cold weeks they’d had, it must be safe for skating. In some towns there would be lights by the lakeside and skating children; not in this one. And for that she could only be grateful, because she did not think she could bear the sight of children skating or lights on the icy surface of a frozen lake. Even after the thirteen years.

Along its last quarter mile, Temple Street acquired an aluminum guardrail and some halogen overhead lights, though on these, too, the metal was torn up, unscrewed, pried loose by the locust-junkies.

At the light that marked the intersection with Route 4 stood a large gas station. It was one of a number owned by an immigrant from India. Once the immigrant himself had worked in it, then he’d bought it, then bought others and real estate to go with them. Now he employed other Indian immigrants who worked long shifts, day and night. In the previous twelve months, according to the county newspaper, no fewer than four of the immigrants had been shot dead in holdups and another four wounded.

Mary waited at the light, and it was really easier to think about the poor slaughtered Gujaratis than about the frozen lake. She prayed for them, in her way, eyes focused on the turn signal. It did not suit her to utter repetitions. Rather the words came to her on all the music she had heard, so many settings, that prayer sung over and over since the beginning of music itself.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

Miserere nobis.

Then there was Route 4, the American Strip. And this was New Jersey, where she had ended up, its original home and place of incubation, whence it had been nourished to creep out and girdle the world. It had come in time to her own stately corner of North Carolina, looking absolutely the same.

Since her widowhood and recovery, Mary Urquhart had lived in a modest house in what had once been a suburb of this New Jersey city, only a few blocks beyond its formal border. At the suburban end of her street was a hill from which the towers of Manhattan were visible on the clearer mornings. All day and most of the night, planes on a southward descent for Newark passed overhead and, even after so many years, often woke her.

But Mary was not, that afternoon, on her way home. A mile short of the city line, she pulled off Route 4 onto Imperial Avenue. The avenue led to a neighborhood called Auburn Hill, which had become an Italian enclave in the Spanish-speaking section of the ghetto. Auburn Hill could be relied upon for neat lawns and safe streets, their security reinforced by grim anecdotes of muggers’ and housebreakers’ summary punishments. Young outlaws nailed to tar rooftops with screwdrivers. Or thrown from an overpass onto the Jersey Central tracks fifty feet below. At Christmastime, the neighborhood sparkled with cheery lights. Mary had come to know it well and, comprehending both the bitter and the sweet of Auburn Hill, was fond of it.

Camille Innaurato’s was like the other houses in that end of town. It was a brick, three-bedroom single-story with aluminum siding and a narrow awning of the same. It had a small lawn in front, surrounded by a metal fence, and a garden in the back where Camille grew tomatoes and peppers in season.

When Mary pulled into the driveway, she saw Camille’s pale, anxious face at the picture window. Camille was mouthing words, clasping her hands. In a moment she opened the door to the winter wind, as Mary emerged from her car and locked it.

“Oh, Mary. I’m thanking God Almighty you could come. Yeah, I’m thanking him.”

Camille was one of those women who had grown older in unquestioning service to her aged parents. She had helped raise her younger brother. Later she had shared with her father the care of her sick mother. Then, when he died, she had assumed it all — her mother the house, everything. Camille worked in a garment-sewing shop that had set itself up on two floors of a former silk mill; she oversaw the Chinese and Salvadoran women employed there.

Her younger brother August, was technically a policeman, though not an actively corrupt one. In fact, he had no particular constabulary duties. The family had had enough political connections to secure him a clerical job with the department. He was a timid, excitable man, married, with grown children, who lived with his domineering wife in an outer suburb. But as a police insider he knew the secrets of the city.

The Innauratos, brother and sister, had inherited nothing from their parents except the house Camille occupied and their sick mother’s tireless piety.

Mary Urquhart stepped inside and took Camille by the shoulders and looked at her.

“Now, Camille, dear, are you all right? Can you breathe?”

She inspected Camille and, satisfied with her friend’s condition, checked out the house. The living room was neat enough, although the television set was off, a sure sign of Camille’s preoccupation.

“I gotta show you, Mary. Oh I gotta show you. Yeah I gotta.” She sounded as though she were weeping, but the beautiful dark eyes she fixed on Mary were dry. Eyes out of Alexandrian portraiture, Mary thought, sparkling and shimmering with their infernal vision. For a moment it seemed she had returned from some transport. She gathered Mary to her large, soft, barren breast. “You wanna coffee, Mary honey? You wanna biscote? A little of wine?”

In her excitement, Camille always offered the wine when there were babies, forgetting Mary could not drink it.

“I’ll get you a glass of wine,” Mary suggested. “And I’ll get myself coffee.”

Camille looked after Mary anxiously as she swept past her toward the kitchen.

“Sit down, dear,” Mary called to her. “Sit down and I’ll bring it out.”

Slowly, Camille seated herself on the edge of the sofa and stared at the blank television screen.

In the immaculate kitchen, Mary found an open bottle of sangiovese, unsoured, drinkable. She poured out a glass, then served herself a demitasse of fresh-made espresso from Camille’s machine. In the cheerless, spotless living room, they drank side by side on the faded floral sofa, among the lace and the pictures of Camille’s family and the portrait photograph of the Pope.

“I used to love sangiovese,” Mary said, watching her friend sip. “The wine of the Romagna. Bologna. Urbino.”

“It’s good,” Camille said.

“My husband and I and the children once stayed in a villa outside Urbino. It rained. Yes, every day, but the mountains were grand. And the hill towns down in Umbria. We had great fun.”

“You saw the Holy Father?”

Mary laughed. “We were all good Protestants then.”

Camille looked at her in wonder though she had heard the story of Mary’s upbringing many times. Then her face clouded.

“You gotta see the babies, Mary.”

“Yes,” Mary sighed. “But do finish your wine.”

When the wine was done they both went back to look at the fetuses. There were four. Camille had laid them on a tarpaulin, under a churchy purple curtain on the floor of an enclosed, unheated back porch, where it was nearly as cold as the night outside. On top of the curtain she had rested one of her wall crucifixes.

Mary lifted the curtain and looked at the little dead things on the floor. They had lobster-claw, unseparated fingers, and one had a face. Its face looked like a Florida manatee’s, Mary thought. It was the only living resemblance she could bring to bear — a manatee, bovine, slope-browed. One was still enveloped in some kind of fibrous membrane that suggested bat wings.

“So sweet,” Camille sobbed. “So sad. Who could do such a thing? A murderer!” She bit her thumb. “A murderer the degenerate fuck, his eyes should be plucked out!” She made the sign of the cross, to ask forgiveness for her outburst.

“Little lamb, who made thee?” Mary Urquhart asked wearily. The things were so disgusting. “Well, to work then.”

Camille’s brother August had discovered that the scavenger company that handled the county’s medical waste also serviced its abortion clinics, which had no incinerators of their own. The fetuses were stored for disposal along with everything else. August had fixed it with the scavengers to report specimens and set them aside. He would pass on the discovery to Camille. Then Camille and a friend — most often Mary — would get to work.

Mary knew a priest named Father Hooke, the pastor of a parish in a wealthy community in the Ramapos. They had known each other for years. Hooke had been, in a somewhat superficial way, Mary’s spiritual counselor. He was much more cultivated than most priests and could be wickedly witty, too. Their conversations about contemporary absurdities, Scripture and the vagaries of the Canon, history and literature had helped her through the last stage of her regained abstinence. She knew of Julian of Norwich through his instruction. He had received her into the Catholic Church and she had been a friend to him. Lately, though, there had been tension between them. She used Camille’s telephone to alert him.

“Frank,” she said to the priest, “we have some children.”

He gave her silence in return.

“Hello, Frank,” she said again. “Did you hear me, Father? I said we have some children.”

“Yes,” said Hooke, in what Mary was coming to think of as his affected tone, “I certainly heard you the first time. Tonight is … difficult.”

“Yes, it surely is,” Mary said. “Difficult and then some. When will you expect us?”

“I’ve been meaning,” Hooke said, “to talk about this before now.”

He had quoted Dame Julian to her. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Those were lines he liked.

“Have you?” she inquired politely. “I see. We can talk after the interment.”

“You know, Mary,” Father Hooke said with a nervous laugh, “the bishop, that pillar of intellect, our spiritual prince, has been hearing things that trouble him.”

Mary Urquhart blushed to hear the priest’s lie.

“The bishop,” she told him, “is not a problem in any way. You are.”

“Me?” He laughed then, genuinely and bitterly. “I’m a problem? Oh, sorry. There are also a few laws…”

“What time, Father? Camille works for a living. So do I.”

“The thing is,” Father Hooke said, “you ought not to come tonight.”

“Oh, Frank,” Mary said. “Really, really. Don’t be a little boy on me. Take up your cross, guy.”

“I suppose,” Hooke said, “I can’t persuade you to pass on this one?”

“Shame on you, Frank Hooke,” she said.

The drive to the clean outer suburbs led through subdivisions and parklands, then to thick woods among which colonial houses stood, comfortably lighted against the winter night. Finally there were a few farms, or estates laid out to resemble working farms. The woods were full of frozen lakes and ponds.

The Buick wagon Mary drove was almost fifteen years old, the same one she had owned in the suburbs of Boston as a youngish mother driving all the motherly routes, taking Charles Junior to soccer practice and Payton to girls’ softball and little Emily to play school.

The fetuses were secured with blind cord in the back of the station wagon, between the tarp and the curtain in which Camille had wrapped them. It was a cargo that did not shift or rattle and they had not tried to put a crucifix on top. More and more, the dark countryside they rode through resembled the town where she had lived with Charles and her children.

“Could you say the poem?” Camille asked. When they went on an interment Camille liked to hear Mary recite poetry for her as they drove. Mary preferred poetry to memorized prayer, and the verse was always new to Camille. It made her cry, and crying herself out on the way to an interment, Mary had observed, best prepared Camille for the work at hand.

“But which poem, Camille?”

Sometimes Mary recited Crashaw’s “To the Infant Martyrs,” or from his hymn to Saint Teresa. Sometimes she recited Vaughan or Blake.

“The one with the star,” Camille said. “The one with the lake.”

“Oh,” Mary said cheerfully. “Funny, I was thinking about it earlier.”

Once, she could not imagine how, Mary had recited Blake’s “To the Evening Star” for Camille. It carried such a weight of pain for her that she dreaded its every line and trembled when it came to her unsummoned:

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,

Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light

Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown

Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!

It had almost killed her to recite it the first time, because that had been her and Charles’s secret poem, their prayer for the protection that was not forthcoming. The taste of it in her mouth was of rage unto madness and the lash of grief and above all of whiskey to drown it all, whiskey to die in and be with them. That night, driving, with the dark dead creatures at their back, she offered up the suffering in it.

Camille wept at the sound of the words. Mary found herself unable to go on for a moment.

“There’s more,” Camille said.

“Yes,” said Mary. She drew upon her role as story lady.

Let thy west wind sleep on

The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,

And wash the dusk with silver Soon, full soon,

Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,

And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:

The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with

Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.

Camille sobbed. “Oh Mary,” she said. “Yours weren’t protected.”

“Well, stars…” Mary Urquhart said, still cheerfully. “Thin influence. Thin ice.”

The parlor lights were lighted in the rectory of Our Lady of Fatima when they pulled off the genteel main street of the foothill town and into the church parking lot. Mary parked the station wagon close to the rectory door, and the two women got out and rang Father Hooke’s bell.

Hooke came to the door in a navy cardigan, navy-blue shirt and chinos. Camille murmured and fairly curtsied in deference. Mary looked the priest up and down. His casual getup seemed like recalcitrance, an unreadiness to officiate. Had he been working himself up to deny them?

“Hello, Frank,” said Mary. “Sorry to come so late.”

Hooke was alone in the rectory. There was no assistant and he did his own housekeeping, resident rectory biddies being a thing of the past.

“Can I give you coffee?” Father Hooke asked.

“I’ve had mine,” Mary said.

He had a slack, uneasy smile. “Mary,” the priest said. “And Miss … won’t you sit down?”

He had forgotten Camille’s name. He was a snob, she thought, a suburban snob. The ethnic, Mariolatrous name of his parish, Our Lady of Fatima, embarrassed him.

“Father,” she said, “why don’t we just do it?”

He stared at her helplessly. Ashamed for him, she avoided his eye.

“I think,” he said, dry-throated, “we should consider from now on.”

“Isn’t it strange?” she asked Camille. “I had an odd feeling we might have a problem here tonight.” She turned on Hooke. “What do you mean? Consider what?”

“All right, all right,” he said. A surrender in the pursuit of least resistance. “Where is it?”

“They,” Mary said.

“The babies,” said Camille. “The poor babies are in Mary’s car outside.”

But he hung back. “Oh, Mary,” said Father Hooke. He seemed childishly afraid.

She burned with rage. Was there such a thing as an adult Catholic? And the race of priests, she thought, these self-indulgent, boneless men.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “What can be the matter now? Afraid of how they’re going to look?”

“Increasingly…” Father Hooke said, “I feel we’re doing something wrong.”

“Really?” Mary asked. “Is that a fact?” They stood on the edge of the nice red Bolivian rectory carpet, in the posture of setting out for the station wagon. Yet not setting out. There was Haitian art on the wall. No lace curtains here. “What a shame,” she said, “we haven’t time for an evening of theological discourse.”

“We may have to make time,” Father Hooke said. “Sit down, girls.”

Camille looked to Mary for reassurance and sat with absurd decorousness on the edge of a bare-boned Spanish chair. Mary stood where she was. The priest glanced at her in dread. Having giving them an order, he seemed afraid to take a seat himself.

“It isn’t just the interments,” he told Mary. He ignored Camille. “It’s the whole thing. Our whole position.” He shuddered and began to pace up and down on the rug, his hands working nervously.

“Our position,” Mary repeated tonelessly. “Do you mean your position? Are you referring to the Church’s teaching?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked around as though for help, but as was the case so often with such things, it was not available. “I mean I think we may be wrong.”

She let the words reverberate in the rectory’s quiet. Then she asked, “Prodded by conscience, are you, Father?”

“I think we’re wrong on this,” he said with sudden force. “I think women have a right. I do. Sometimes I’m ashamed to wear my collar.”

She laughed her pleasant, cultivated laughter. “Ashamed to wear your collar? Poor Frank. Afraid people will think badly of you?”

He summoned anger. “Kindly spare me the ad hominem,” he said.

“But Frank,” she said, it seemed lightly, “there is only ad hominem.”

“I’m afraid I’m not theologian enough,” he said, “to follow you there.”

“Oh,” said Mary, “I’m sorry, Father. What I mean in my crude way is that what is expected of you is expected personally. Expected directly. Of you, Frank.”

He sulked. A childish resentful silence. Then he said, “I can’t believe God wants us to persecute these young women the way you people do. I mean you particularly, Mary, with your so-called counseling.”

He meant the lectures she gave the unwed mothers who were referred to her by pamphlet. Mary had attended anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrations with pride. The abortion clinic demonstrations she undertook as an offered humiliation, standing among the transparent cranks and crazies as a penance and a curb to pride. But surprisingly, when she was done with them in private, over coffee and cake, many pregnant women brought their pregnancies to term.

She watched Father Hooke. He was without gravitas, she thought. The hands, the ineffectual sputter.

“For God’s sake,” he went on, “look at the neighborhood where you work! Do you really think the world requires a few million more black, alienated, unwanted children?”

She leaned against one of his antique chests and folded her arms. She was tall and elegant, as much an athlete and a beauty at fifty as she had ever been. Camille sat open-mouthed.

“How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It’s respectability you’re after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you’re afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That’s man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That’s God’s image, don’t you know that? That’s what you’re scared of.”

He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.

“Your grief…” he began. A weakling, she thought, trying for the upper hand. Trying to appear concerned. In a moment he had lost his nerve. “It’s made you cruel … Maybe not cruel, but…”

Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief. Maybe I’m drunk again tonight, eh Father? Who knows?”

Thirteen years before on the lake outside Boston, on the second evening before Christmas, her husband had taken the children skating. First young Charley had wanted to go and Charles had demurred; he’d had a few drinks. Then he had agreed in his shaggy, teasing, slow-spoken way — he was rangy, wry, a Carolina Scot like Mary. It was almost Christmas and the kids were excited and how long would it stay cold enough to skate? Then Payton had demanded to go, and then finally little Emily, because Charles had taught them to snap the whip on ice the day before. And the lake, surrounded by woods, was well lighted and children always skated into the night although there was one end, as it turned out, where the light failed, a lonely bay bordered with dark blue German pine where even then maybe some junkie had come out from Roxbury or Southie or Lowell or God knew where and destroyed the light for the metal around it. And Emily still had her cold and should not have gone.

But they went and Mary waited late, and sometimes, listening to music, having a Wild Turkey, she thought she heard voices sounding strange. She could remember them perfectly now, and the point where she began to doubt, so faintly, that the cries were in fun.

The police said he had clung to the ice for hours, keeping himself alive and the children clinging to him, and many people had heard the calling out but taken it lightly.

She was there when the thing they had been was raised, a blue cluster wrapped in happy seasonal colors, woolly reindeer hats and scarves and mittens, all grasping and limbs intertwined, and it looked, she thought, like a rat king, the tangle of rats trapped together in their own naked tails and flushed from an abandoned hull to float drowned, a raft of solid rat on the swells of the lower Cape Fear River. The dead snarls on their faces, the wild eyes, a paradigm she had seen once as a child she saw again in the model of her family. And near Walden Pond, no less, the west wind slept on the lake, eyes glimmered in the silver dusk, a dusk at morning. She had lost all her pretty ones.

“Because,” she said to Father Hooke, “it would appear to me that you are a man — and I know men, I was married to a man — who is a little boy, a little boy-man. A tiny boy-man, afraid to touch the cross or look in God’s direction.”

He stared at her and swallowed. She smiled as though to reassure him.

“What you should do, Father is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. Your mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity you are.”

“You are a cruel bitch,” Hooke said, pale-faced. “You’re a sick and crazy woman.”

Camille in her chair began to gasp. Mary bent to attend her.

“Camille? Do you have your inhaler?”

Camille had it. Mary helped her adjust it and waited until her friend’s breathing was under control. When she stood up, she saw that Father Hooke was in a bad way.

“You dare,” Mary said to him, “you wretched tiny man, to speak of black unwanted children? Why, there is not a suffering black child — God bless them all — not a black child in this unhappy foolish country that I would not exalt and nourish on your goddamn watery blood. I would not risk the security of the most doomed, lost, deformed black child for your very life, you worthless pussy!”

Father Hooke had become truly upset. My Lord, she thought, now I’ve done it. Now I’ll see the creature cry. She looked away.

“You were my only friend,” Father Hooke told her when he managed to speak again. “Did you know that?”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, Father. I suppose I have my ignorant cracker side and God help me I am sick and I am crazy and cruel. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Pray for me.”

Hooke would not be consoled. Kind-hearted Camille, holding her inhaler, took a step toward him as though she might help him somehow go on breathing.

“Get out,” he said to them. “Get out before I call the police.”

“You have to try to forgive me, Charles.” Had she called him Charles? How very strange. Poor old Charles would turn in his grave. “Frank, I mean. You have to try and forgive me, Frank. Ask God to forgive me. I’ll ask God to forgive you. We all need it, don’t we, Father.”

“The police!” he cried, his voice rising. “Because those things, those goddamn things in your car! Don’t you understand? People accuse us of violence!” he shouted. “And you are violence!” Then he more or less dissolved.

She went and put a hand on his shoulder as Camille watched in amazement.

“God forgive us, Frank.” But he leaned on the back of his leather easy chair and turned from her, weeping. “Oh Frank, you lamb,” she said, “what did your poor mama tell you? Did she say that a world with God was easier than one without him?”

She gave Father Hooke a last friendly pat and turned to Camille. “Because that would be mistaken, wouldn’t it, Camille?”

“Oh, you’re right,” Camille hastened to say. The tearful priest had moved her too. But still she was dry-eyed, staring, Alexandrian. “You’re so right, Mary.”

When they were on the road again it was plain Camille Innaurato was exhausted.

“So, Mary,” she asked. “So where’re we going now, honey?”

“Well,” Mary said, “as it happens, I have another fella up my sleeve.” She laughed. “Yes, another of these worthies Holy Mother Church provides for our direction. Another selfless man of the cloth.”

“I’ll miss Mass tomorrow.”

“This is Mass,” Mary said.

“Right. OK.”

This is Mass, she thought, this is the sacrifice nor are we out of it. She reached over and gave Camille a friendly touch.

“You don’t work tomorrow, do you, love?”

“Naw, I don’t,” Camille said. “I don’t, but…”

“I can take you home. I can get this done myself.”

“No,” said Camille, a little cranky with fatigue. “No way.”

“Well, we’ll get these children blessed, dear.”

The man Mary had up her sleeve was a priest from Central Europe called Monsignor Danilo. It was after ten when Mary telephoned him from a service station, but he hurriedly agreed to do what she required. He was smooth and obsequious and seemed always ready to accommodate her.

His parish, St. Macarius, was in an old port town on Newark Bay, and to get there they had to retrace their drive through the country and then travel south past several exits of the Garden State.

It took them nearly an hour, even with the sparse traffic. The church and its rectory were in a waterfront neighborhood of refineries and wooden tenements little better than the ones around Temple Street. The monsignor had arranged to meet them in the church.

The interior was an Irish-Jansenist nightmare of tarnished marble, white-steepled tabernacles and cream columns. Under a different patron, it had served the Irish dockers of a hundred years before. Its dimensions were too mean and narrow to support the mass of decoration, and Father Danilo’s bunch had piled the space with their icons, vaguely Byzantine Slavic saints and Desert Fathers and celebrity saints in their Slavic aspect.

Candles were flickering as the two women entered. The place smelled of wax, stale wine and the incense of past ceremony. Mary carried the babies under their purple cloth.

Monsignor Danilo waited before the altar, at the end of the main aisle. He wore his empurpled cassock with surplice and a silk stole. His spectacles reflected the candlelight.

Beside him stood a tall, very thin, expressionless young man in cassock and surplice. The young man, in need of a shave, held a paten on which cruets of holy water and chrism and a slice of lemon had been set.

Monsignor Danilo smiled his lupine smile, and when Mary had set the babies down before the altar, he took her hand in his. In the past he had sometimes kissed it; tonight he pressed it to his breast. The intrusion of his flabby body on her senses filled Mary with loathing. He paid no attention to Camille Innaurato and he did not introduce the server.

“Ah,” he said, bending to lift the curtain under which the creatures lay, “the little children, no?”

She watched him regard the things with cool compassion, as though he were moved by their beauty, their vestigial humanity, the likeness of their Creator. But perhaps, she thought, he had seen ghastly sights before and smiled on them. Innocent as he might be, she thought, he was the reeking model of every Jew-baiting, clerical fascist murderer who ever took orders east of the Danube. His merry countenance was crass hypocrisy. His hands were huge, thick-knuckled, the hands of a brute, as his face was the face of a smiling Cain.

“So beautiful,” he said. Then he said something in his native language to the slovenly young man, who looked at Mary with a smirk and shrugged and smiled in a vulgar manner. She did not let her gaze linger.

Afterward, she would have to hear about Danilo’s mother and her trip to behold the apparition of the Virgin in some Bessarabian or Balkan hamlet and the singular misfortunes, historically unique, of Danilo’s native land. And she would have to give him at least seventy-five dollars or there would be squeals and a disappointed face. And now something extra for the young man, no doubt an illegal alien, jumped-ship and saving his pennies.

Camille Innaurato breathed through her inhaler. Father Danilo took a cruet from the paten and with his thick fingers sprinkled a blessing on the lifeless things. Then they all faced the altar and the Eastern crucifix that hung suspended there. They prayed together in the Latin each knew:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

Miserere nobis.

Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she still stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest and the questionable young man and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor. Adoring, defiant, in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness, she offered It Its due, by old command.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,

Have mercy on us.