Thomas M. Disch (36 page)

“Elevators make you nervous, Father?”

“No. No, of course not. I was only… curious.” He entered the elevator with obvious reluctance, and Gerhardt stepped in after him and pressed the button marked 4. The doors slid closed, and they descended.

The doors opened with a hiss, and Gerhardt stepped out. Father Pat followed him, stepping gingerly. He looked about at the gray concrete blocks of the corridor with almost as much amazement as when he’d entered the Shrine itself.

“We are in the crypt?” Father Pat asked.

“The crypt? I don’t think I’ve heard anyone call it that since the Monsignor’s day. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Let’s go down to the crypt, Gerhardt.’

Other times he’d say these were his catacombs. Like in Rome. When we were in Rome, in ‘fifty-one, he took me to a church called Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which he explained means ‘Saint Mary on top of Minerva.’ Minerva was one of the pagan goddesses, and they built the church on top of what used to be a temple to her, and there were catacombs under that. I served Mass for the Monsignor there.”

“Gerhardt! Thank God you’re here. I was going crazy.”

While he was speaking, Gerhardt had advanced to the first turning of the corridor, and there was Hedwig ahead of him at the far end, outside the door to the main kitchen.

Gerhardt made a cautionary gesture. “Of course I’m here, Hedwig. And Father Pat is here with me.”

“Oh,” she said, in another voice entirely, as Father Pat followed Gerhardt around the turn of the corridor. “Oh, I see. Father Pat, how wonderful that you’ve been able to come here at last.”

“God’s will be done,” said Father Pat with a benign smile. As he approached Hedwig, he extended his right hand, with the palm of it lowered and the fingers drooping, as though (Gerhardt thought) he expected Hedwig to kiss it.

Hedwig took it, somewhat disconcertedly, in her left hand, and that was odd, too.

“Hedwig,” said Gerhardt, noticing how his sister held her right arm close to her body. “Have you hurt your arm?”

“It’s nothing,” said Hedwig, releasing Father Pat’s hand and cupping her right hand, which was pressed against her stomach, with her left. “I had a small accident. It’s of no importance.”

“Did one of our young ladies—” He did not complete the question, not wanting to reveal his central anxiety about the operation of BirthRight to Father Pat, who would probably learn soon enough how rebellious his charges could be.

Hedwig smiled brightly. “No, no, nothing of that sort. It was my own foolishness.” She gave her brother a warning grimace, then smiled more brightly still at Father Pat. “And it certainly didn’t stop me from preparing.

. . What do you think, Father?”

“I really can’t imagine,” said Father Pat.

“Sauerbraten! With spaetzle!”

“Is that so?” Father Pat replied, with a blank look.

“Father Pat loves sauerbraten,” Gerhardt assured his sister.

“Oh yes,” Father Pat agreed. “Very much. And the young ladies— will they be dining with us?”

Hedwig cast down her eyes. “No. Unfortunately. They’ve already had their dinner. It will just be the three of us. But I suppose you’d like to see your room now, and to freshen up. You’ll be staying in the Monsignor’s suite, with its own private chapel. And Gerhardt?”

“Yes, Hedwig?”

“Will you just make sure that everything is all right in the kitchen?

I’ll join you there as soon as I’ve seen Father Pat to his room.”

Gerhardt went into the kitchen and stared sullenly at the pots on the gigantic electric range. The kitchen was of institutional proportions, having been designed for the eventuality of serving a small army of the faithful in the event of nuclear war. The metal countertops and shelves were festooned with huge stainless steel pots and pans and cooking utensils, all dully gleaming like armor. Hedwig had tried, here and there, to add a homier touch, but all the various houseplants, in their pots and baskets, tended to become sickly with no other source of light than the fluorescent bulbs, and the ceramic kittens and other knickknacks didn’t produce the same effect of cozy good cheer that they had in Hedwig’s own kitchen in Willowville. They seemed, much like the girls domiciled on the floor below, forlorn and resentful, and they awakened an answering resentment in Gerhardt. For a moment he felt tempted to take up the nearest figurine—an infant angel sitting, beelike, atop a daisy—and smash it to bits. But Gerhardt was not one to yield to such irrational impulses.

However, when Hedwig returned, he was snappish. “How in hell did you manage to break your arm?”

She didn’t answer at once but stood in the doorway, glowering.

“Well?” he insisted.

“How do you think? By trying to move the corpse in the freezer!”

“Oh, shit,” said Gerhardt.

“Please watch your tongue. I have to put up with enough filthy language from that Peck girl. I don’t have to hear it from my own brother. And I think I’m owed some kind of explanation.”

Gerhardt bit his lip. He had not wanted Hedwig—or anyone else— to know about Peter Bryce. If he had not been called back to the Twin Cities to bring Father Pat to the Shrine, this would not have happened. He had managed to dispose of the old woman without great difficulty, for there was, in fact, a literal catacomb in the sixth and lowest subbasement of the Shrine. The architect, Ernst Kurtzensohn, had foreseen the need to provide for the rapid interment of those who had been injured in the initial blast or later developed radiation illness and died after they’d been admitted to the shelter. So the Monsignor’s reference to his “catacombs” had not been entirely a jest. Gerhardt was certain that no one any longer knew of the existence of this special facility, and so it seemed to have been made on purpose for the disposal of Mrs. Bryce’s and her son’s corpses.

The only difficulty had been with Peter. Because of the man’s obesity, Gerhardt had been unable to raise him to the level of even the lowest of the burial chambers, which stood at a height of four feet above the floor. Even the old woman had taxed his strength. Indeed, he’d almost been unable to move Peter’s body out of the back of the limousine and into the wheelbarrow beside it. So, when Father Cogling had called to insist that Gerhardt return to the city, he had trundled the body back into the elevator and up to the fourth subbasement and deposited him in the walk-in freezer until such time as he could deal with the matter in a less hasty fashion. He had intended either to rig up some kind of hoist or else to dismember the corpse into more liftable pieces, which might be done without unsightly gore if the body were given time to freeze solid.

What Gerhardt had not foreseen was that Hedwig would decide to enter the freezer herself to get one of the precooked sauerbratens stored there. She’d even said, before he’d driven off, that she meant to make sauerbraten to welcome Father Pat to the Shrine, but Gerhardt hadn’t put two and two together.

“Hedwig,” Gerhardt said in a tone of stern authority, “this is not a matter that I’m free to discuss with you.”

“No?”

“No. I must ask you just to forget what happened today.”

“And every time I go to the freezer to get some food, I must
overlook

the fact that there is the corpse of a fat man in a wheelbarrow there?”

“He will not remain there long. The corpse will be interred in the sixth subbasement, where provision has been made for exactly that.”

Hedwig looked aghast. “You’ve been on six? Gerhardt, there are bats down there!”

“There were bats down there, Hedwig, but that was some long while ago.

And I think the problem was taken care of when I sealed up the broken screen on the ventilator. In any case, I was down there yesterday and saw no sign of bats.”

“A month ago you said you’d seen their… excrement.”

“But not a great deal of it.”

“I can see the bats outside at twilight. There are hundreds of them, Gerhardt. And that’s where they must live. There’s not anywhere else they could be. They’ve got some cave down there that they know how to get to. You promised me you wouldn’t go down there again until we’d had professional exterminators check the entire floor.”

“Exterminators are expensive, Hedwig. You know that.”

“If you let bats get into other parts of the Shrine, Gerhardt, I won’t remain here. There are limits to what you can ask of me. I will do what must be done for BirthRight, even if it means I risk being put in prison. I will even forget that I have seen a corpse in the food locker. But I won’t live here with bats.”

“You’re being irrational, Hedwig.”

“Yes, about bats I will be as irrational as I like.”

“We can’t discuss this now, in any case. Father Pat will be expecting his dinner.”

“I know that. But there’s one more thing. You’ll have to take me to the doctor in Leech Lake. I may have broken my wrist trying to move that wheelbarrow to get at the chest with the sauerbraten. The whole thing turned over on me, and for a while I thought I’d be trapped underneath it and freeze to death.”

“I’ll look at it myself once Father Pat is out of our hair.”

“I’ve looked at it, Gerhardt. It’s bruised dark purple. I need a doctor to look at it.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Of course it hurts.” But there was an affectionate note in her impatience. “But when has that ever stopped me?”

Gerhardt smiled his approbation. They might have their disagreements from time to time, but when it came right down to it, they were both Obers. He stood up and took her afflicted hand in his, and, as she winced, he lifted it to his lips and kissed it. “There. Now it will be all better.”

“You’re impossible,” she told him, but he knew she’d been won round.

Finally his sister always recognized his authority, and that was why he loved her so.

“Mary, my dear, are you awake? Mary?”

It was the voice of Hedwig Ober. Mary Tyler kept her eyes closed. “I know she’s not asleep, Father. Perhaps if you were to say something to her. .

“Mary?” It was a stranger’s voice, not Gerhardt’s. The way he spoke her name was almost a caress, and when he spoke again, he placed his hand on her shoulder with the same gentleness. “Mary, I’d like to talk with you.”

The moment she opened her eyes, the tears welled up and began to roll down the sides of her face. The man whose touch had summoned the tears was standing at the side of the bed, and Mary found herself looking up into the familiar wrinkled face of Hedwig Ober, who was bent over her, attentive.

“You see, I knew it, she
is
awake,” Hedwig said with a little squint of vindication. “And already she’s begun to cry.”

Mary tried to lift her hand to wipe away the tears, but she could raise it only a few inches from the bed before the canvas restraint prevented further movement.

“I should explain,” said Hedwig, backing away from the bed. “It’s not that Mary’s ever shown any tendency to violence. Unlike the Peck girl, in Cell Four, who cannot be trusted at all. It’s rather that she has developed an unfortunate nervous habit. She pulls out her hair. One after another, hair by hair. She understands that she mustn’t do it, but she sometimes has no control over herself. The way some children can’t be kept from biting their nails.

Isn’t that so, Mary?”

Mary could see the arm of the man touching her and, turning her head sideways, his shoulder and the front of his black suit, but unless she pushed her head back against the pillow she could not see his face. But she knew that he was a priest, for he had a white collar around his neck instead of a necktie. And there was a kind of comfort in having a priest beside her, touching her.

“Am I dying?” she asked the priest.

“Mary!” Hedwig scolded. “Such a question! As though one never saw a priest except on one’s deathbed. For heaven’s sake!”

The priest’s fingers closed a little more tightly about the girl’s shoulder. “We are all dying, Mary,” he said in a gentle voice. “Each day that we live we are a little closer to our death, but we can never know when that day will be. The healthiest of us may die tomorrow, struck by the plague. Only God knows the hour that has been set. That is why we must always be prepared.

Are you prepared?”

There was something strangely comforting in having her fears dealt with so directly instead of being told that she must buck up and smile and be more positive. It was like spinning the dial of the radio when you’re very sad and finding a song as sad as you are. She closed her eyes and, without really knowing why, she said, “Thank you.”

“I think,” said the priest, letting loose her shoulder, “that Mary wants to go to confession.”

“Naturally,” said Hedwig. She moved farther away from the bed but showed no intention of leaving Mary’s cell.

“So we must be alone,” the priest insisted.

“Of course, Father. What am I thinking? When you’re done, just press that buzzer there on the wall by the head of the bed, and I’ll know you want me back.”

“And if there is any way to extinguish the light… ?”

“You want to be in the dark?”

“Yes, since we can’t use a proper confessional.”