A Live Coal in the Sea

by Madeleine L'engle

Camilla shook her head.

  Olivia sighed. ‘It’s hard for us to overturn our background. I, too, was brought up not to ask. It’s almost impossible to unlearn.’

  Camilla sat back in the rocking chair, closed her eyes, then opened them, questioning. ‘Mama, will he come back? This is not Kenya. He won’t go and then stay away for a year …’

  Olivia slid down from the high stool. ‘He’s going to Frank. Therefore I know he will come back.’ She went to the fridge and opened the door. ‘Let’s eat upstairs in the bedroom where it’s at least ten degrees cooler.’

  Rafferty called while they were eating in the bedroom, taking advantage of the air conditioner. The atmosphere outside was thick, with a low growling in the background. Somewhere a storm was brewing. With the change of time it must have been midnight or after in Paris.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do,’ Rafferty kept saying.

  ‘The baby—is the baby going to be all right?’

  ‘He’ll live. They gave him a blood transfusion and he’s going to make it. What on earth am I going to do with him? What on earth?’

  Olivia had gone downstairs to the phone in the study. ‘Right now, Rafferty, you need some sleep.’

  ‘Rose—Rose—the funeral—’

  ‘What about it, Father?’ Camilla asked gently.

  ‘There’s a little church not far from—one night she said that if anything happened she wanted to be buried there. I thought she was just being morbid. I spoke to the priest—we’re not Catholics—he wasn’t sure—’

  ‘Father,’ Camilla said despairingly, ‘I don’t want you to have to go through this alone.’ She had called her doctor, who had said, ‘Do you wish to lose your baby in Paris? I’m sorry, Camilla, I can guess how you’re feeling, but I don’t want you farther from the hospital than the university.’

  Olivia spoke with quiet authority. ‘Rafferty, Art, my husband, will be with you. We have discussed this, and he will fly to Paris tomorrow. Camilla can’t come, you know that, but you will not be alone.’

  ‘I’ll be most grateful,’ Camilla heard her father saying. Again, tears rushed to her eyes, this time tears of awe at what Art and Olivia were offering.

  Art and Olivia.

  Mama and Papa.

  “They were there for me,” Camilla told Raffi. “They made all the difference.”

  Raffi’s boots were kicked under the sofa. She sat cross-legged, as Mac had so often sat. Scratched her foot through her heavy green sock. “It’s a crazy story, Grandmother.”

  “As your father remarked, it out-soap-operas his show.”—And I haven’t told you all, and won’t.

  Raffi pulled off her sock and inspected her foot. “I need to cut my toenails. Oh, Grandmother, why didn’t I know all this long ago?”

  “Perhaps the timing wasn’t—” Camilla broke off. “I don’t know, Raffi.”

  “I can’t imagine it,” Raffi said. “I mean, I can’t imagine me being pregnant, and Mom being pregnant, too.” She pulled off her other sock. “My poor dad. What a way to get born.”

  What a way.

  Even in the midst of it Camilla balked at the irrationality of the situation.

  She wanted Mac.

  Olivia brought Camilla a cup of tea. Camilla leaned up on one elbow to take the cup. ‘It’s so wonderful of Papa to do this, to go be with my father.’

  ‘Not wonderful at all,’ Olivia said. ‘Necessary. Rafferty should not be alone. He is in no condition to make decisions by himself. He needs someone to be there for him. To listen. To care.’

  ‘He’s got to be angry.’

  ‘Anger and grief and confusion all mixed together. Yes. Drink your tea, sweetheart. I don’t want you getting dehydrated.’

  The air conditioner buzzed steadily, fighting the heat. There was too much to absorb. Rose’s death. The baby who was not Rafferty’s. Rose, Camilla felt occasionally, was within telephoning distance. Mac was not. Upside down. Everything was once again upside down.

  The phone rang. Rafferty and the bishop calling. Rafferty sounded a little more in control. ‘Art found another church, not far. The priest was kind. It will all be quiet and dignified. She would have liked more of a splash, but—this is the best we can do.’

  The bishop asked, ‘How are my girls? Camilla?’

  ‘I’m fine. Mama is being wonderful.’

  ‘We’re about to turn in for the night.’

  ‘The baby. What about the baby?’

  The bishop said, ‘There’ll be time to talk about all that later. Now let me say good night to Olivia.’

  At bedtime Olivia came into Camilla’s room, stood looking around as though seeing for, the first time the crisp white curtains at the windows, the pale lemon-yellow walls, the polished hardwood floor, the big brass bed. ‘My dear—’

  ‘What is it, Mama?’

  ‘May I sit down?’ Without waiting for an answer Olivia sat on the side of the bed. ‘The night after Art’s consecration—’

  Camilla looked at Olivia’s drawn face. Olivia had started to tell her something that night, and had stopped.

  ‘My son has hurt you,’ Olivia stated.

  ‘You told me he would—would leave—sometimes—’ Camilla faltered.

  ‘Even though he is my son, even though I know—’

  ‘Know what, Mama?’

  ‘That night at the beach I left off in the middle, didn’t I? And I decided that since Mac had come back from his walk and interrupted us, perhaps I never had to go any further. But now I think I must, for two reasons. One, to help you understand Mac. That alone would not make me break silence. The other—oh, Camilla, there has been gossip raising its ugly head and I do not want you to hear a garbled version from some troublemaker. Better you hear it from me.’

  Camilla waited. Afraid.

  ‘I told you about Art, what his father did to him. It was not a secret between us. All I wanted was to protect Art, to keep him from suffering that way ever again. We can’t do that, you know, can’t keep those we love from suffering, doing wrong, terrible wrong.’ Olivia’s breathing was shallow. She wore a pale lavender dressing gown and the lace at her throat quivered with her breaths. But she continued. ‘Art is a handsome older man, but as a young man he was beautiful, like one of those Greek statues. His congregation thought of him as their beautiful young priest, though he was thirty when we were married, and had been assistant at two other churches. But he was beautiful and, in a strange way, innocent. Perhaps I was innocent, too. It was a long time ago. I’ve forgotten. Almost forgotten that early happiness.’ She sighed, a long, tremulous letting-out of breath. ‘We moved to Nashville, our first uprooting. But the church was vibrant, and Art inherited a fine music program. We all loved music, Mac, too, even as a little boy, and he often slipped into the back of the church when the organist was practicing, or during choir rehearsal.’

  Camilla once more put her hands protectively over her belly, as though to keep the baby within from being hurt by anything Olivia might have to say.

  Olivia continued, ‘Oh, God, this is hard. Before Art’s consecration there was a rumble, quickly squashed, but I had prayed the past would not come up to smear the present. And now, once again—’

  Olivia’s voice was low, but clear. ‘The year that Mac was eight he came home from school one day and went into the church to do his homework in case there might be music. He saw—’ She stopped. Put her face in her hands. Dropped her hands to her lap. ‘He saw his father and the organist, sodomizing.’ She put her hand to her mouth. Put it down. ‘Art was bent over, with the organist mounting him. I’m sorry to put it in such an ugly way, but that’s what it was. Mac fled. T.J. Jensen was already his best friend. He fled to T.J.’s house. When he was not home for the evening meal we had no idea where he was. He always let us know if he was going to be late. Art did not know what Mac had seen. He had no idea.’

  —No, Camilla thought.—No. Not Papa. No.

  Olivia continued. ‘We were ready to cal
l the police when it occurred to me Mac might be at T.J.’s. They didn’t have a phone, so I got in the car and went over. Mac would not speak to me. He lay on T.J.’s bed in fetal position and would not move, and I knew something terrible had happened, but I had no idea what. Finally I went back for Art. When Mac saw his father he screamed. And Art guessed. And told me.

  ‘We couldn’t get Mac to come home. The doctor came. Said Mac had suffered some kind of psychic shock and it was best to leave him where he was unless we wanted him straitjacketed and taken to the hospital. So we went home.’

  Tears were running down Olivia’s cheeks. Camilla was blinded by shock. She looked at Olivia, but she did not see her.

  ‘The organist,’ Olivia resumed, ‘I do not want to mention his name. We will not be free while he is on this earth, with his resentment, his jealousy of Art. He went to the bishop and accused Art of seducing him. He turned what had happened around, to save his own skin.’

  Upside down. Upside down. Not Art.

  ‘I believed Art then and I believe him now that it was a throwback to his father. He simply did not defend himself. That is a fact, not an excuse. Who the bishop believed I do not know, but he did not believe in airing the Church’s dirty linen in public. He went, himself, to the Jensens. I don’t know what he said, but Mac came home. We went to a psychiatrist, all of us. But terrible damage was done. It was the beginning of Mac’s retreating whenever anything was too much for him. Art and I went to the psychiatrist together, and then I went to another one as well because I was torn apart with anger. He told me that many children who have been sexually abused become homosexual later. He was not helpful to me.’ Her small smile was wry.

  ‘Mama—’ Camilla breathed.

  Olivia nodded slightly. ‘Psychiatrists are only people with a little more training than the rest of us. They are not God. The poor man simply added to my confusion. I walked through life like a ghost, reminding myself of my father. One evening Mac’s third-grade teacher called me, said, diffidently, that he might be out of line but he would like to talk to me about my son. I had not closed myself off from help. I agreed to meet him after school the next day. Went to his empty classroom. He was a slight young man with a pleasant smile.

  ‘He had a reputation for being the best third-grade teacher around, Edward Osler, and I was delighted when Mac was placed in his class. He pulled up a chair for me, then sat at his desk and looked at me, a long, thoughtful gaze. I just sat, hard as rock. Finally he said, “I love the kids I teach. Mac is one of the brightest and best.” I asked him if something was wrong that he had asked to see me, and he shook his head impatiently, then told me that he was putting himself in a position where he could lose his job if our conversation ever was made public. I was in such a dark place that there was no way I could promise confidentiality until I knew what he was going to say. He would have had every right to terminate the conversation, then and there. He told me that he was homosexual, that he had been living with a friend since they were in college. “What you are angry about,” he told me, “is not the fact of homosexuality, but people using other people for their own purposes. What Mac saw was not an act of love but an act of abuse, and abuse stretches across all sexuality.” I must have looked as though I were about to faint, because he handed me a glass of water.

  ‘Finally I whispered, “How did you know?”

  ‘We live in a very small world, he said, and Mac’s behavior in school had made him wonder. It took a while and some general questioning for him to put two and two together, and I know that he didn’t tell me everything. There was compassion in his voice, and no trace of fear for the consequences to himself. I found myself talking, telling him what he had only guessed. Promising silence.

  ‘He reached across his desk to me, and took my hands. He told me that people make mistakes, but are not bound by them. He told me that Art and I would love each other more, not less. I sat there and wept because I thought I had lost Art forever, that he might as well be dead. Young Edward handed me his handkerchief, a clean linen square, and quoted to me something written around fourteen hundred, by William Langland.’ Olivia closed her eyes, remembering, reciting. ‘“But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea.”’

  Camilla shuddered. Mercy? If she accepted mercy for Olivia and Art, for Mac, she had to accept it for herself, for Rose, for whoever had fathered the baby.

  ‘Finally’—Olivia’s voice was so low it was barely audible—‘we all began to heal. I continued to see Edward, the young teacher. We trusted each other. I fed him back the psychiatrist’s words. He was a chilly man, and he held a chilly future out to me. Edward laughed heartily, and said that he did not believe in a deterministic universe. “I listen to your husband preach every Sunday,” he said. “I take from his hands the body and blood of the Lord. Artaxias Xanthakos is a man of love, not self-indulgence or abuse. You are the one he loves, as Matthew is the one I love. It takes love to recognize love.” I asked him, “Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?” He laughed, and said no, he was a teacher, that was his vocation. He and the love he gave me were so great that they thawed the ice in which I had encased myself. I turned, at last, to Art for love. At first I could barely endure it. Then, at last, it became once again a joy. I was able to be a wife. A mother.’

  Olivia smiled, a small uplift of the lips. ‘When Mac knew once more that I loved Art, that Art loved me, he, too, healed. Slowly. We invited Edward and his Matthew to dinner, and they began to come a couple of times a month. Edward told Mac about the tree house he had built, and the next week Mac and T.J. began building theirs. Edward taught him to pitch a baseball with an almost unhittable curve. Mac very seldom came into the church and we made no issue of it. All that mattered was that we became a family again, through God’s inestimable mercy.’

  ‘Oh, Mama—’ Camilla reached out to Olivia and the two women held each other.

  ‘You talk about anger, dearest. I know all about anger. I know that it cannot be avoided, that it has to be moved through. You will move through yours because you have a loving heart. You may not understand, because there are things we never understand completely, but you will not stay in anger.’

  For the moment Camilla was beyond anger.

  Olivia said, ‘I have prayed and prayed about whether or not I should tell you this. But the gossip, the ugly hint which came from the organist, who is far, far away in another state, at a large cathedral … He left shortly after he and Art—I do not think I could have stood it if he had stayed. But while he is alive there is no peace. The slander was squashed, but then Mac’s leaving you, abandoning you at such a time—I felt you had a right to know. For mercy’s sake.’

  The next evening Olivia and Camilla sat at the battered table under the pine tree to eat supper. For a while, neither of them spoke. Finally, Olivia said, ‘You’ve seen Art and me together. You know that we love each other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Young Edward Osler was right. Our love became deeper and richer than it had been before. Art forgave me, as I forgave him. It took Mac longer to forgive us, and I knew that I did not deserve forgiveness.’

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ Camilla said, ‘if we had to deserve it—’

  ‘I know. Forgiveness is a mercy. My only part in it was to accept it. That came fully when Art had pneumonia and nearly died. Mac and I held each other all night long. I held Mac and the child held me, while Art was gasping away his life. The doctors, the nurses, had given him up. But suddenly his breathing eased. And that incredible, anguished, glorious mercy filled our hearts.’

  When Camilla was undressed and ready for bed she turned to Olivia to say good night. ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I need to know about mercy, too.’

  ‘Mac—’

  ‘Not Mac. My mother. Her—whoever the baby’s father is. They were so happy, my parents, and now—’

  ‘Now we must all love each other more than ever.’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes,’ Camilla said, ‘I know. But I need mercy, first.’

  She slept fitfully, waking with the word “mercy” on her lips. Art. Would she ever feel the same calm comfort from Art? But had not that calm comfort come through fearsome effort?

  For no reason, she thought of Luisa, wanted to reach for the phone and call, even if it was two o’clock in the morning. But she could hear Luisa’s slightly abrasive voice, ‘Hell, Camilla, you’re growing up at last. This is what it’s all about.’

  Mercy. It didn’t mean that everything was okay, could or should be condoned. But we can’t move out of ourselves and our own self-justifications until we look in the mirror and know, yes, I, too, could have done this. Or worse. My anger at my mother. At Mama for telling me things I don’t want to know. At Mac, for being in England when I need him here.

  The baby kicked her. Grow up, Camilla. If you’re going to be a mother, you’d better grow up.

  The rectory was quiet. Olivia saw to it that Camilla ate. Smiled occasionally. Sometimes they reached out and clasped hands. Waited for the phone to ring.

  The first time Camilla heard Olivia’s merry peal was when Dr. Edison came to visit, bringing a recording of Bach’s Musical Offering. ‘Here’s something to make number patterns with. No, no tea, hot or cold, thank you, Mrs. Xanthakos. We drink enough tea in this town to deplete the water level of the planet. Let’s just talk. I’m terribly sorry I haven’t been in touch before, Camilla, but I’ve been out of town and just heard the news. How well do you know Latin?’

  ‘Modestly,’ Camilla said.

  ‘I’m an old-fashioned Southerner and I don’t swear in English.’ She burst into a streak of Latin syllables which Camilla more or less understood and which set them all to laughing so hard that the laughter was more than half tears.

  ‘There,’ Dr. Edison said. ‘I feel better. I can’t say I’m sorry, Camilla, because it’s beyond that. The poor little baby. How is your father going to manage all alone?’

  Camilla and Olivia exchanged glances. Dr. Edison knew only the smallest part of the story, and that was bad enough. ‘I don’t know,’ Camilla said. ‘We’re still so shocked by my mother’s death we haven’t got much beyond that. I suppose Father could get a nurse.’ That had not occurred to her before, but she had to say something. Dr. Edison knew only what everybody else in Corinth and Athens knew, the bare, tragic bones of Rose’s death and the baby’s dramatic delivery.