The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (11 page)

That, Tabitha realized, is part of the problem. It’s hard enough to deal with a mother, especially an annoying mom like a Leontina Scales. But to have her promoted with no advance warning into grandmotherliness—well, it’s shocking. And she’s not taking care of her hair at all.

She looks like Albert Einstein when he was discovering electricity

“What’d he say?” asked Tabitha, when Kirk had hung up with that irritating gentility he showed to inanimate objects.

“Basically, he reminded us that he had divorced her thirteen and a half years ago and it was our turn.”

“To take care of her?” Tabitha was shocked.

“To divorce her.”

“And you said?”

“I said, Screw you, Daddy Booth.”

“Screw you? Gee whillikers, Boy Wonderpants, don’t be so Fifties! I mean, for God’s sake, can’t you even say
fuck you
when it’s the right time to say fuck you? What do you think, you’re on some kind of a—a cruise? Screw you, in your white tuxedo? Do you need to take Cursing for Dummies?
It’s fuck you.
Listen and learn. Repeat after me. Fuck
you.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck
you.”

“No, fuck you.”

“A little enthusiasm. Say it as if you mean it. You sound like you’re asking to borrow someone’s cell phone. Put some feeling into it. Poke your clenched hand in my face. Like so.

Fuck you.”

“Fuck
you.”

From behind the slightly ajar door, their mother’s voice ventured. “Otherfuckers! Ill you otherfuckers shut the fuck up?”

“Motherfuckers,” Hogan interpreted as the talk radio host paused to grab a breath. “Now that notion is seriously creepy.”

The doorbell rang. Kirk went to answer it. “Say it to whoever it is, Kirk, say it say it say it. I dare you. It’s practice,” said Tabitha, pirouetting close behind him. He opened the door and muttered, “Hellotherefuckyou,” under his breath. Mrs. Chanarinjee handed him a casserole covered with tin foil and fled.

JEREMY WAS LATE. He’d been gathering his papers, the photocopied lyric sheets and pencil-corrected vocal parts (working at sparer harmonies, more Brian Eno, less Crosby, Stills and Nash), and he remembered a half-song scribbled late last night, at one of those testing moments of loneliness. It must have fallen to the floor by the side of his narrow bed. In lurching to grab it he knocked over the stack on the bedside table. Including the paperback Bible he used for his church work.

Exhibit A slid from its sacred keep between the pages of Kings. That snapshot. The only one Jeremy had. The sole material evidence of his own private David and Jonathan story only without, so far, the death in battle. It might have had the decency to land facedown on the floor, but it didn’t. Two abashed but undaunted faces caught in a half kiss courtesy of someone’s archaic black and white film stock. Familiar as myth and just as distant.

Jeremy could hardly imagine he’d ever been capable of glowing like a Three Mile Island meltdown. Unsettling, the way the effect of an insubstantial kiss lingered through time, a harmonic just beyond the capacity of the ear to apprehend, but not of the memory to register and to twist, once again, between poles pulling either grateful or sour.

He stuffed the photo back in the Bible without being sure of its precise address. Let it spend some time away from “Thy love for me was greater than that of a woman.” Perhaps the cold shower of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” No surprise that David the buff savior of the nation calling Jonathan to his tent for figs and wine and torchlit sex on the sheepskin had become, when older and wiser, David the disconsolate psalmist. Hadn’t David also written musical settings to which his psalms should be sung? Opinions were divided, though it was easier to imagine a Brian Eno treatment of De Profundis than, say, the surfer-dude chorale of the Beach Boys.

The matter of Willem, so volatile maybe because so suppressed, was hard to tamp down once it emerged. On the way to the first session on Slopemeadow Road, Jeremy tried to divert himself from the sting of it. Rehearsing a tenor glissando, a swooping sixth, he thought mostly of the barn swallows, the parabolic loops they used to make from the eaves of the lake house where he had spent summers with his parents back when they were still easy with him. The swallows came and went in couples. On any given summer morning, one was never more than moments away from the other; you hardly had to turn your head to find the mate. What if one died, victim of some kind of avian heart attack? The other one seemed to disappear. Jeremy had never seen a barn swallow on its own.

Not as if he hadn’t tried to leave, he talked to himself. That terrible aborted campaign to relocate himself in California. Peggy Mueller had a sister who worked as an executive assistant for a music producer and everyone did what Peggy Mueller said, including her siblings. So five years ago Jeremy hadn’t renewed his lease on his apartment in Thebes, and had resigned from his church job, and with a lump in his throat that proved such symptoms were not merely figures of speech he’d tried to escape. Survived the flight from Albany to Chicago, and the flight from Chicago to LAX in alternating paroxysms of pride and terror. Eileen, Peggy’s sister, had made up the foldout sofa in the condo’s low narrow living room. It looked out on a view of the San Bernardino Mountains, sere and brown as Mount Sinai for all Jeremy could tell. Not quite the land of milk and honey, despite its reputation.

She’d brought him to a dinner party that first Saturday. He still cringed at the thought of it. Six or eight people. Had Eileen been trying to see if she could flush his possible gay identity out into the public by observing him in the company of the L.A. ambisexual elite? If so, she’d failed. (Only after he’d fled had he realized how single she had seemed, and that her hopes of his romantic availability must have been attached to her welcome.) The guests were all roughly his age—mid twenties cresting at or just across the threshold of their thirties. Jeremy had been unable to pick up the simplest cues as to their makeup or character. The women posed brittle and laconic in over-large, candy-colored plastic eyeglass frames and wry expressive earrings; the men glistened sleek as pumas in their nylon dance-competition shirts and smart linen slacks that were in fact disappointingly slack. The dinner party had been rife with the cabbalistic mysteries of foreign society; the horde of guests and Eileen, too, spoke in L.A. code.

Jeremy couldn’t guess if they were anything but asexual until he was emerging from a bathroom, where he’d gone to splash water on his face. One of them—probably one of the men, though everyone’s voice seemed coolly inflectionless and on the same pitch, or was that something wrong with his ears due to the air pressure of the transcontinental flights?—one of them said something like, “How public-spirited of you to bring him out to play, Eileen.”

“Shh,” she had said; the “shhh” had cut through him. He strained more keenly. “Eileen, are you sure he’s house trained? Devon, you’re very brave to let him sit on your Ernardo Praxis leopards-and-lilies without a splat mat. Or are you about to have it re-upholstered again? He’s a gorgeous house present; they can be cute when they’re stupid, and he’s
very
cute.” A hiss of suppressed mirth—not so much a laugh-track as a sneer-track.

He didn’t remember much about how he’d explained his change of heart to Eileen. It had cost all he had left to convert the return ticket he’d intended to use at Christmas into flights the following Tuesday morning. And, injury piled upon insult, in the weeks that followed, no one from the agencies he’d rung ever answered his call. Only one of the nine demo tapes he’d sent out came back, and that one was “return to sender” because the agency had closed or moved.

No childhood nook in his parents’ home to which he could crawl—not welcome there—and no other ideas. Ashamed at his public humiliation—Jeremy Carr, off to make his career in the L.A. big time!—he’d commandeered a corner of Marty’s living room floor until he’d gotten the job at the school, and then the parish council offered him his old job back. The single barn swallow had tried to leave, but had had to loop back.

How much of his failure to escape was due to Willem? How much of his attachment to Willem was due to his parents’ polite lack of interest in his affairs? The parabolic loops were endless, but he swooped about Thebes year after year, unable to untie the knots. Only music

seemed to help. It hardly mattered whether he was steeped in his own compositions or some saccharine late-nineteenth-century hymn tune. Any time he opened his mouth to sing, the lump in his throat dissolved and a single barn swallow escaped for a certain number of bars, until the bars closed in again.

J EREMY ARRIVED FIRST. No other cars in the circular drive. Sister Alice pulled up next, in a new car. “You don’t use the motorcycle at night?” he asked.

“This is a rental,” she replied. “Little incident with a brain-dead driver passing on a stretch of the Syracuse road where the shoulder was torn up for repair.”

“Nobody hurt, I hope.”

“Only the bike.”

As Jeremy began to suspect that Sister Alice was naming herself as the brain-dead driver, Babs showed up, her headlights raking the dark drive askance, braiding the surface in a nubble of gravel. “My comrades at arms,” said Jeremy.

Sister Alice was brusque and friendly in about equal proportions. She shook their hands and bustled about the trunk of the car, hoisting a couple of bags of groceries. Sean shuffled forward to help her. “That’s a good lad. Thanks. Mind the pears, they’ll bruise.”

“And so it starts,” mumbled Sean in a low voice.

“And so it does. Right this way, fellows. I have a key this time, but next week you’ll have to ring the bell. I’d call ahead and remind Sister Jaundice you’re coming; she’s the most ambulatory and she mans the door in the evening.”

“Sister Jaundice?” said Jeremy.

“Oh, now that’s a slip. Can you tell I’m a tad overworked? Sister Jeanne d’Arc, I mean.

My my.” Her face was red. “Sister Jaundice was a pet term from when Sister Jeanne d’Arc spent a couple of years as head of the infirmary at the convent in Waterbury, Connecticut. Tending the sick was not her strong suit. But don’t call her Sister Jaundice if you know what’s good for you.”

“I have a bad feeling about all this,” said Sean. “Is this the Sisters of the Order of Frankenstein?”

Jeremy had to concede it: the place had a Gothic aspect. Three stories of ivy-clutched gray stone, rusticated blocks with beveled edges, were capped with a roof of iron-brown slates and multiple gables and eaves. Forsythia planted on either side of the front door had gone mad and overgrown; the bare hoops of it looked like giant spider legs in the shadows. The granite steps were littered with leaves. “I ring,” said Sister Alice, “so as not to startle Sister Igor, and I enter.” It wasn’t nice to hear her join their mocking, which made them drop it; perhaps, thought Jeremy as they followed her in, that was her strategy.

The place had clearly been built as a convent. Instead of an imposing reception hall with black-and-white marble floors and a sweeping staircase—no Mother Superior would ever allow herself to make that grand an entrance—visitors came immediately upon a second door. A screened window was inset at face height. “Another time, Sister Jeanne d’Arc will meet you here,” said Sister Alice, “but today we pass on.” She unlocked the barricade and led them through into a modest, walnut-paneled chamber. A few wooden chairs, an umbrella stand, and a painting of the Virgin looking gripped with a case of cramps. A sweet smell of a generic floor wax was fletched with tones of rising damp and stewing celery. Sister Alice groped for a light switch, but the wall sconces were fitted with electric bulbs whose wattage barely made it into the double digits. Very Eastern Europe, thought Jeremy. He didn’t look at his friends.

The colored glass looked encrusted with bird shit. Sean said, “It all falls in place. The Addams family were lapsed Catholics. McAddams originally. Yes, that makes a lot of sense.”

“And then Sister Jeanne d’Arc will lead you through here.” Sister Alice pushed at a swinging door, revealing a long corridor that ran the width of the building. “The chapel is straight ahead—I’d show you but I think the Sisters are waiting—the kitchens and dining areas down to the right, but we head here. Ow.” She had walked into a bicycle parked in the gloom.

“Sister Clothilde and her weight problem. We can’t afford an Exercycle so she uses the real thing. She’s supposed to keep it in the laundry. Mind your way, fellows. We’re going to the sunroom at the end of the corridor.”

At 7:30 p.m. the sunroom was, of course, devoid of daylight. The furniture seemed to be shrouded in dust cloths, but when Sister Alice pressed the push-button light switch, the dust cloths turned out to be nuns.

“Holy Jesus,” murmured Sean. “They’re
baaaaaack.”

“You’re sitting here in the dark?” said Sister Alice.

“Sister Felicity was saving electricity,” said a voice from behind the piano. “She was leading us in a guided meditation.” Eyes were blinking, chins were lifting. Nuns were coming around.

“Sisters, Sisters,” said Sister Alice, “God be with you and good evening and what are you thinking of? Where’s Mother Clare du Plessix?”