The Next Queen of Heaven-SA (20 page)

“That’s not much help when she won’t go out of the house any more,” said Tabitha. “I’ve tried to get her to go back to the doctor but she won’t budge.”

“If you’ve got a doctor who’s not being helpful, we can get Joanie Buselle in here,” said Huyck. “She’s not a Radical Radiant Pentecostal but she’s a good solid nurse. She’s the only one that Herm Mendoza allows to take the stitches out of his toes when he sews them up to make webbed feet. She’s good with people. And with ducks.” Suddenly he felt there was some room to be hopeful. “I like the idea of eating the Bible. Something so good, something so rich and rewarding, why wouldn’t you want to eat it all up?”

“I used to eat the Hardy Boys,” said Kirk helpfully.

They all stared at him. Leontina Scales went,
“Pfffff,”
like a balloon venting.

“Daddy Wally gave us a whole set of Hardy Boys from way long ago, like World War II days,” Kirk explained. “In a box, about thirty of them. Printed on this rich, creamy, thick cheap paper that had gone all yellow, and the edges didn’t line up neatly like in modern books. Every page was a different width. When I used to read them at night—since Hogan doesn’t like to read, and Tabitha doesn’t either—”

“Tabitha
can’t
read,” said Hogan.

Behind her mother’s back she gave Hogan the finger. “Oh, my,” said Huyck, but it came out sounding admiring.

Kirk was oblivious. “Well, I used to rip a strip off the margin of the paper and wad it up like a piece of gum and chew it while I was reading. When the paper had lost its taste I’d flick it out onto the wall behind the radiator. There’s still a huge clump of dried spitballs, clutching like a coral reef. I ate my way through the entire Hardy Boys.”

“You would,” snickered Hogan. “Who’d you enjoy more, Frank or Joe? Or could you manage to take them together?”

“You’re so lame,” sputtered Kirk, but the presence of a minister in the house apparently aborted any other response. The boy turned scarlet.

“At least if I was going to eat books, I’d eat Nancy Drew. I’d eat her and eat her—”

“You perv.” Tabitha landed a backhand slap on Hogan’s crown. “You’re sick.”

“Hey Kirk, did you ever try eating Tom Sawyer? How about, um, Hamlet. Since you’re into meat. Or, no, I know, I know: I know what I’ll get you for Christmas! A copy of
Moby Dick!

I’d like to see you try to swallow—” He howled with dry fake laughter. Kirk got up and—well, Huyck would have liked to think that he stalked out of the room, but the pastor was afraid that, technically, it was a flounce. The boy needed someone to slip him a copy of
Playboy
before it was too late, but this was outside the arena in which Huyck could sensibly work. He sighed, and thought: Mother married three times and no husband around now; the daughter has a reputation that verges on slutdom, the older son is a bully, the younger son a sissy. What a holy little family.

“I do think I should talk to your mother alone,” said Huyck. He had allowed himself to neglect his duties and to abandon his authority in the face of Tabitha’s biscuity appeal. It was time to do his work. “Tabitha, Hogan—”

But Mrs. Scales seemed to have had enough, too, even before they’d started. She dumped the Bible onto the folding table and wheeled her arms about, signaling that she wanted to be pulled to her feet. “Air is the house of God!” she cried. “Air! Air!” The others looked around themselves. Did she want the front door open? It was a bit stuffy, but that was the heady strawberry lotion.

She lurched across the braided rug to the bedrooms that opened off the other end of the room. “Air is it!” she wailed. She pushed open a door. Tabitha and Hogan stayed still, looking defeated.

“Now she’s back to stalking, great,” said Hogan. “What, we gotta get a leash?” Huyck told himself to be the adult these children sorely needed, and he followed Mrs.

Scales. “Air is the house of the Lord!” she said, through clenched teeth, standing in the middle of a bedroom. Huyck guessed it was Hogan’s room. A bank of black-sheathed stereo equipment flashed more colored lights than the cockpit of a 747. Posters showing some pretty athletic-looking women alternated with posters of Megadeth. A mound of clean laundry was dumped on the unmade bed, and a pile of paperbacks was topped with a pamphlet that said “So You Want to Join the Army.” Half hidden under the pillow was a dog-eared copy of one of the Narnia books.
The Last Battle,
it looked like.

Mrs. Scales turned and passed by Huyck as if he were part of the ugly furnishings of the room. He felt cheapened. He followed her.

“Air is the house of the Lord!” she said again, only more to herself, and shoved through the second bedroom door.

“Mom,” said Kirk, and turned his head to the wall. He’d been having a little cry for himself. Jesus, in your infinite mercy help these people, said Huyck to himself. Kirk’s room was Spartan compared to the mess in the rest of the place. There was a Save the Whales poster showing a whale arcing through outer space. Shoes were lined up punctiliously on the closet floor, and on the radiator cover, clusters of plastic ivy leaves surrounded an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven color photocopy of one of those Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian looking just a hair-trigger short of sexual ecstasy—oh, the handwriting was on the wall here.

“Do you
mind?”
said Kirk in a fawningly polite voice. At least the kid was capable of sarcasm, that primary tool of adolescents everywhere.

“Air is the house of God!” Mrs. Scales pointed her index finger upward.

“Do you mean
there
it is?” said Kirk matter-of-factly. “Up there, there it is? Or do you mean
where
is it?”

“Air
is it?” she jabbered, excited.

At once Huyck was able to recognize the challenge of the moment. This was the skill that made him such an effective minister. “I shall take you there; that’s why I’ve come,” he said. “I shall take you home. You are looking for your true home, not your earthly home; and I shall show it to you. Come with me.”

“Actually, she was looking for something in the basement,” said Hogan loudly, from the other room.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Kirk, sighing. “We’ll go with you.”

“I’m not going nowhere,” called Hogan.

“Go to hell,” said Tabitha.

“Not there either.”

“Get your mother her coat,” said Huyck. “Tabitha, will you join us? We’re off to the church. Your mother is looking for her beginning, for where she starts; she wants to eat the Bible, she needs to be where it’s baked. Come on. Her true home is in the house of God. Isn’t she saying so? Come
on.”

“God, another boss,” muttered Tabitha. “Three daddies aren’t enough, we gotta have Daddy Pastor too?”

They had to tilt Mrs. Scales into the backseat of Huyck’s Rabbit, because he was afraid she would forget about having to hold the bungee cord and then she might go bouncing out onto the road. Kirk climbed into the back with her and held her hand when she would let him. Tabitha got in front and folded her beautiful bare legs—they must be icy cold!—into the space as best she could. The knees angled toward the shift, and every time Huyck went into fourth his knuckles grazed her knees. “It’s November, you’re crazy to go out like that,” he told her.

“Put on the heat, why don’t you.”

He put on the heat and the speed, and they were pulling into the parking lot in less than twenty minutes.

Leontina Scales swiveled her head around with a wary look. “You know where you are now, Mom, don’t you?” said Kirk. “Look, Cliffs of Zion. You want to go in?” Her children scrambled out of the car and tugged her out of the backseat. She seemed uncertain again. A cold wind arose, ripping the brown leaves from around the roots of the lilac hedge, tossing them over the parking lot.

“We’ll enter God’s house, and pray for mercy,” said Huyck. He was back on home turf now. Even Tabitha’s leggy splendor seemed muted here. In fact, he should probably advise her that she was not properly attired for the circumstances, but in the light of the needs of her mother perhaps he would let it go. Huyck put an arm around Leontina’s waist, and pivoted her toward Cliffs of Zion. Just as neatly she slipped her waist out from beneath his arm, somehow, and she hurried in a determined, animal-like way in the other direction, across to the side door of Our Lady’s.

“Oh Lordy,” said Huyck. “Don’t tell me we’ve lost her to Rome.” She flung the door open and hurtled herself inside. The Scales children and Huyck followed a few steps behind. Mrs. Scales stood poised on the landing for a moment, then plunged down the stairs. Huyck prayed that Father Mike Sheehy had locked the door to the kitchen, but his prayers apparently didn’t have much currency in a Catholic church, for the door to the kitchen was easily flung wide, and Mrs. Scales barreled through.

Following, they found her on the floor beside the refrigerator, lying like a corpse, hands folded over her breast, eyes open. She was training her gaze on the top of the Kelvinator where, if Huyck had the story straight, a crappy old statue of Our Lady had been lurking, waiting for its victim. “Other of God, pray for us sinners,” said Mrs. Scales.

CLOUDS FROM O NTARIO dredged the lake, dragging meat-locker air across apple orchards and gravel pits and spurs of abandoned railroad lines, up the sloping plain to Thebes.

On his way from the grade school—Jeremy took a half-day’s sick leave so he could pick Sean up at the mill—he passed three buggies, their bearded drivers and bonneted wives looking as if they’d been driving toward a funeral since the Nineteenth century. Amish from up near Morristown, probably; you rarely saw them down this far. Jeremy decided not to mention them to Sean.

“The saintly Jeremy doing his duty of charity again.” Only Sean could sound put out at being catered to. He all but fell into the front seat. “Fuck, it’s icy. Is your thermostat broken or what?”

Sean kept cranking the heat up, but every time he closed his eyes and leaned against the headrest, Jeremy twiddled the knob back down. He was afraid he’d doze in the coziness and crash on 1-81.

He trotted out a couple of limp remarks—“Can’t believe they’ve still got those north-bound lanes closed; it’s gonna take us hours to get home” and “Don’t suppose you’ve managed to hook up with your Hector at some salad bar”—to which Sean only grunted in reply.

They lapsed into silence; this had become part of the routine. On the way to the outpatient clinic at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, Jeremy had learned not to probe about Sean’s blood profile. They pretended they were going to some concert out of town. Right in step with Sean’s knee-jerk denial instincts: Jeremy knew that Sean hauled his ass off to Syracuse instead of to the clinic on Morse Hill Road so no one in any blood lab there might recognize him and blab to his folks about it. “In my own time,” he’d once barked at Jeremy. But would the time still be his own when, at last, Sean had to let them know?

Sometimes they sang, and that was useful as well as fun. Sean’s Irish tenor could improvise complementary harmonies and counterpoints to lend character to Jeremy’s melody.

Later, Jeremy often found himself rewriting lyrics to reflect Sean’s more oblique take on the straightforward sentiments he tended to produce on his own. The numbers still essentially Jeremy’s, but as fed through Sean’s more wily sensibility.

But though Jeremy began to hum some of the pieces they had worked on at the convent last week, after the nunaholic love-fest, Sean didn’t rise to the bait today. Jeremy hoped this didn’t mean Sean had even weightier concerns. He could be so contemptuous when you asked a question that sounded too Miss Manners. Yet if you treated the thing openly—T-cell counts, bogs of depression, breathing problems, the protease inhibitor cocktail still not quite taking?—that tetchy streak of Sean’s kicked in too. Though Jeremy hated to think of it in these terms, it was as if Sean were saying, You avoided being intimate with me in any of the ways that were attractive, Jeremy, so you’ve forfeited the right to be intimate with my dying.

Fifteen minutes before they reached the Syracuse city lines, Sean roused himself a little.

“What kind of plans do you have for Thursday, by the way?”

“The usual somewhat chill invitation from Dad to come home. I told him I can’t. It would be a kindness, but he gets in this weepy limbo of missing Mom and I can’t deal.”

“I don’t follow. They got divorced, and he goes to pieces when she dies?”

“It’s called the mystery of human misery. But he’s got his brother and ninety thousand nieces and nephews, every one of them straight and functioning. He can focus on them. I just remind him of Mom. I look like her too much.”

“So what are you doing by way of our annual feast of gluttony?”

“Church in the morning, then I don’t know what. Father Mike invited me to join him and Sister Alice. Going out. Olive Garden maybe.”

“You haven’t said yes?” Sean cracked his knuckles. “You’re waiting to see if sweet Willem calls?”

But Jeremy had been expecting this and he blatted out a Phyllis Diller horseshit laugh.

Unconvincing, but useful as a segue to his own question about Sean’s plans.

In brogue. “Oh, laddie, it’s the purgat’ry of home agin, for me sins don’t you know. Sure and doesn’t himself deserve it.” Sigh. “It’ll be Thanksgiving by the numbers. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Super Bowl, Norman Rockwell’s recipe for stuffing, the whole nine yards. I’ll put myself on autopilot and aim for the post-turkey L-tryptophan slump.”

“Big crowd of relatives coming?”

“Connie, Maura, Mike and Siobhan, Uncle Finny and Aunt Chieko. Uncle Francis and Aunt Mary Pat, Uncle Pat and Aunt Mary Frances. Dad will be half crocked by halftime and Mam will burn at least one hand and probably two by forgetting the potholders. If we’re lucky the dog won’t throw up on the sofa before the scorched pies are served.” Jeremy’s laughing was a little forced. “Why do you go? You could come to my place and have spaghetti and tuna fish with me. Or you could join Sister Alice and Father—”

“I’m not that prodigal. The convent life once a week is enough for this little lapsi-daisy, thank you for asking.”