by Haven Kimmel
Amos cleared his throat but said nothing more.
From Nativity to Crucifixion, Christianity was a club into which Claudia had been born; she hadn’t needed to apply or beg entry. Ludie told her, This is how it is, this is who we are, and it became true, and Claudia had been safe there, all things considered. Even after she had grown past the point of acceptability everywhere else, even when, at eleven, she was taller than all the women in the congregation, no one stared or turned her away. But none of those things were the same as faith.
“I don’t know what it means, to be a believer,” Claudia said.
“No?”
Had there been a moment of suspension in her life when all that was actual, tangible, had fallen away and she had seen something in the remaining darkness? And what would one see in that instant anyway? What had it felt like to believe in Santa Claus or an imaginary friend? Claudia tapped her foot on the floor of Amos’s office, tried to remember not Christmas morning itself, but the feeling of belief. It had been…it had felt as if a wide array of needs was about to be met all at once, this desire, that emptiness, all swept away by wrapped packages and plates of cookies. And when the belief was gone, what was left—what seemed to be left for most adults—was the unending labor of re-creating the myth.
“What happened was…it was a couple years before my mom died, and we were in church during the Easter season, I don’t remember the exact Sunday. I wasn’t listening to the minister—Bill, we called him Pastor B.—I was making a grocery list or something.”
“You’d stopped listening to him.”
“Years before. I’m not sure I ever listened to him, actually. He just said the same things over and over, year after year, I’m sure the same things I could have heard in any mainstream Protestant church anywhere in the country. Over and over.”
“John 3:16.”
“Exactly. But on that Sunday I tuned in just as he was saying it’s impossible to deny the historical proof of the Resurrection and what it means for humankind. Those were his words.”
Amos tilted his head, pushed his glasses up. “What…historical proof?”
“Right? I approached him after the service, something I never did ordinarily, and asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Why, the evidence in the Bible, my dear.’”
Claudia and Amos were silent for a moment.
“That’s too bad,” Amos said.
“Which part? That there is no historical proof, still?”
“It would have been nice.”
She hadn’t felt, in the instant Pastor B. revealed his argument, a crashing disbelief, no temple falling, nothing grandiose or tragic. It was more as if she’d been standing uncomfortably in one room and she took a step sideways and was now standing uncomfortably in another. In the first room she nominally belonged to a group—the congregation of the Jonah Christian Church—and to a larger world, and to a history. Then she didn’t belong anymore. The hardest part was Ludie, how to continue living with Ludie and not let her know. Her mother’s faith was simple, innocent; if told that the stories in the Bible were true and there was proof, and the proof was the Bible itself, Ludie nodded, stood, sang “Blessed Assurance” in her flat contralto. Then she went home and baked a meat loaf.
“There are lots of ways to talk about, to think about the Resurrection,” Amos said, “and all kinds of ways around the damage of our childhood religion.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to suggest that you’re all”—Claudia made a gesture meant to encompass the whole of the clergy—“so circular.”
“I just wonder”—Amos picked up a pencil, put it down—“if there was some other reason, other reasons you might have left the Jonah Christian Church.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
High on the wall behind Amos’s head the black hands of a clock ticked forward; Claudia heard herself breathing in time with it. There had been other reasons, he was right.
“Last full day of work before Christmas,” Claudia said, standing, “and a Saturday besides. I should get over there.”
Amos stood, too, offered Claudia his hand.
“Thanks for talking to me,” she said.
“My pleasure. Come back anytime.”
The sofa, circa 1880, was one of the best pieces Claudia had ever seen pass through the Emporium. The burled walnut was as smooth as glass. Some of the grain looked like caramel being poured hot from a pan. A pew construction with fifteen walnut slats so strong they might have been steel, with a rare double-lyre pattern in the back. Even the fitted cushion was beautiful, a heavy red and gold brocade with two matching bolsters tied with red ribbon, like rare candies.
Claudia didn’t know the man who delivered it; he was in a white step van that advertised nothing—no antique dealer or service. He was middle-aged and silent, wearing a gray wool coat and matching driving cap, obviously not a local. The only question Claudia dared ask him was if the sofa was French. He replied, without looking at her, that it was purchased in a French market but was Swedish in origin.
They carried it all the way back to the Parlor, where its elegance was jarring. The man left without another word. Claudia stood looking at the available space, but there was no part of the Parlor that wasn’t of a piece. What happened in that room was a Saturday afternoon in Queens or Baltimore, a family gathered together to listen to news of the war on the radio, sons too close in age wrestling on the threadbare Oriental. This was not a room that held a double-lyre sofa.
Behind Claudia someone whistled; she turned to see Rebekah walking up the aisle.
“It’s something, isn’t it?”
“Would you even dare sit on that?” Rebekah asked, running her hand over one of the arms.
“It was made for sitting, I guess.”
“How do we know? Maybe it was meant to be just…spectated.”
“Like a museum piece? Maybe.” Claudia straightened the bolster at her end.
“Well, since its original purpose is forever beyond us, let’s go ahead and sit on it.”
“You first.”
Rebekah sat. “Hmmm,” she said, leaning back. “Surprisingly comfortable.” She patted the cushion beside her. “Give it a try.”
Claudia eased herself down beside Rebekah, but the wooden slats made no sound at all. “My God, the Swedes.”
“Where did it come from?”
“A French flea market.”
“No, where did Hazel get it?”
“She said she found someone on the Internet who needed to divest himself of a few fine articles….”
“In a hurry.”
“Exactly.” Claudia leaned back. Rebekah was right—it was comfortable. “In a hurry. You wouldn’t so much want to sit on it to watch a Jimmy Stewart movie, though, would you.”
“Not so much.”
“Okay, let me ask you this.” Claudia turned to Rebekah, continuing a game they’d been playing for the five days they’d lived together. Claudia would pick up an item Rebekah had brought from Vernon’s house and ask her the story of it; Rebekah in turn would ask Claudia to find something in her house that was similar. Narrativewise. Claudia had seen Ruth’s flour sifter and shown Rebekah Ludie’s. She had seen a chipped bud vase from the only time Vernon had given Rebekah flowers, when she had scarlet fever, and she’d held some of the clothes Rebekah had made over the years, creations so strange, the combinations of fabrics so…unlikely, that at first Claudia hadn’t known what to say. Three days later she couldn’t stop thinking about them.
“Tell me about that wooden box you keep on the dresser.”
“Tom Smith and Sons?”
“Yep.”
“Well.” Rebekah took a breath, squinted into the distance. “Terry, the first boy who ever courted me. He was a foster son of one of the elders, he was sixteen, I was fifteen. He began his courtship by leaving a dead king snake on my chair at the church school.”
“Very romantic.”
“I failed to see the
beauty. I ignored him for a year, and in that time he”—Rebekah held up her fingers to count off—“broke his arm trying to impress me by jumping a fence on one of Davy’s horses. He wrecked his father’s car, driving and talking to me through the window as I walked down the street. And he was hit in the thigh by a round of BB’s while singing ‘O Holy Night’ under my window. Pellets fired by my daddy.”
“He was serious.”
“Apparently so. He joined the army, and the night before he left he made one last gesture: he gave me an antique box that had belonged to his real mother, and in it he placed part of a poem and an incisor from a black bear. And just like that, I opened it, I saw what was inside it, and I fell in love with him. Looking back the snake seemed…you know, magnificent, something like that. I kept reliving the moment with the horse, seeing his front feet clear the fence, one of his back legs get caught. And in my vision of it I did not laugh so hard Davy’s mother had to make me lie down on the bed. I was a very different sort of girl.”
Two customers walked by, a young couple in matching camouflage jackets. “What happened? In the end.”
Rebekah sighed. “I never saw him again. He was sent to Korea and he married a seventeen-year-old local girl. He never came back to Jonah. You can look in the box when we get home.”
“What was the poem?” Claudia asked.
“It was by e. e. cummings. I can only remember the first line, ‘your homecoming will be my homecoming.’”
“Cummings? You Pentecostals never cease to surprise.”
Rebekah sighed again. “Terry. He was a rebel in his way. He found the poem in the library, which is where we got all our contraband.” She rubbed her palm over the brocade cushion. “Very nice upholstery.”
“It is.”
“You”—Rebekah turned and looked at Claudia—“know more about me than anyone ever has.”
Claudia blushed, looked at the floor. Rebekah, Claudia knew, loved crisp food and glass doorknobs; she disliked wind and open-backed stairs. She was a morning person and enjoyed the winter, she had a beautiful singing voice and her two smallest toes on each foot were webbed. She had, for years as a child, dreamed she was a twin, and that her brother had died by drowning. She even knew her brother’s name: Samuel. Claudia knew about the girl cousins, and how for one summer they had all pretended to be married to the Apostles. “Well”—she cleared her throat—“I’m sorry to say you’re the only person I’ve ever really known.”
“Really? The only one? What about your sister?”
“Millie?” She might have known Millie briefly, when they were children, but that time was distant and fast fading. “I knew of her.”
“Your dad? You loved your dad.”
Bertram, much on Claudia’s mind of late, had been unknowable to women, and probably to other men. What she treasured of her father now was not any communion they had shared, but just the memory of him in his study at night, writing up policies and reports as he listened to high school basketball on the little black radio with gray knobs. “Yes, I did love him.”
“Okay—look: you had to know Ludie. Nobody could have known Ludie more than you did.”
It was true that she could have recognized Ludie blindfolded, by the smell of her powder, the smell of her comb, or by her odd tuneless humming in the garden. She would sing a few words (while the dew is still on the roses) and then hum more. There was nothing about her mother Claudia didn’t know, nothing she couldn’t have predicted, and yet…“It’s not the same, what I’m talking about with you.”
“Do you know”—Rebekah looked at Claudia, eyes wide—“this is the longest we’ve talked in the past five days without mentioning the baby?”
Just like that, there was the shock, the low, rumbling anxiety. Where was the baby? She had a baby. Mornings Rebekah moved through the kitchen like a waitress, fixing larger breakfasts than Claudia would ever have made on her own. She made cereal for the baby and got him to eat from a spoon, which Claudia still couldn’t convince him to do, and she handed him Cheerios one at a time in his bouncy chair. (He dropped them, mostly.) Every day she put him in his high chair, and he slid sideways and stayed there, like a tired old man on a train, until Rebekah said, “Enough of that, Buttons,” and lifted him out, resting him on her hip as she cleared the table.
Where had she put the baby? He was with Caroline. Claudia should wear a little bracelet printed with HE IS WITH CAROLINE. Was someone going to come for him, was she going to have to kill someone, would she go to jail? “My stomach just somersaulted.”
“You should try to get over that,” Rebekah said, tipping her head back against the rolled wood. “I’m tired.”
“Okay, the baby. The baby reminds me that I got an afternoon appointment for him and for you with Dr. Gil; this is the last day he’s going to be open until after New Year’s, so you have to go.”
Rebekah raised her head. “When did you say?”
“This afternoon.”
“I’d rather not. And also we shouldn’t leave Hazel here alone, it’s going to be busy.”
“Do you realize how long we’ve been sitting here, leaving Hazel alone? And we get to make it up to her this evening; she needs us to pick up some things downtown.”
“Still. I’d rather not.”
Gil Parker’s office was still in the one-story brick building he’d moved into in the early 1970s, when it had seemed a good idea to abandon everything attractive for anything else. The waiting room hadn’t changed at all: there was a metal sculpture on the wall of three men (the three Greek physicians whose names Claudia could never remember); fake-wood paneling; and a corner devoted to faded plastic toys and copies of Highlights and The Bible in Pictures.
“I don’t like doctors,” Rebekah said as Claudia held the door open for her.
“Have you ever even seen a doctor?” Claudia whispered.
“There was a doctor in the church, thank you, who took care of our ailments,” Rebekah whispered back.
“Where did he get his medical degree, in a vision?”
“You’re mean. I don’t like secular doctors.”
“You might have to make adjustments,” Claudia said. The sleeping baby, dressed in a fat, fuzzy snowsuit, weighed, it seemed, two hundred pounds in his car seat basket. A hard plastic runner ran from the doors to the front desk to keep the snow and salt off the carpet. Claudia stepped on it and felt again a tilt, a seesawing dissonance in her chest: the smell of the building, the runner, the metal sculpture. How could she come to terms with it and keep coming to terms with it, that she would lose all she loved and everything familiar to her, if now and again she stumbled into a room unchanged? As if it were possible to keep the room unchanged?
Gil’s wife, Judy, was still behind the reception desk, as she’d been all of Claudia’s life. Now that Claudia was past forty, Judy had finally ceased calling her A Long Cool Drinka Water. “My goodness, you brought the whole battalion.”
“Judy, this is Rebekah, and this is…” On the drive over, she and Rebekah had gone through a list of their favorite names, but hadn’t settled on one. “Oliver. Oliver James. James was my dad’s middle name.” Claudia’s face turned scarlet. She reached up and tugged at the neck of her sweater.
“Hello, Rebekah. Claudia, take that baby’s hood down and unzip his suit before he overheats. And go sit down while I tell Gil you’re here.” Judy typed something into the computer and began printing out a form. “I saw Millie the other day at the Home Depot, she looks like a dadgummed Biafran. Whose baby is this, now? He belong to you, Rebekah?”
“No, he’s…” Claudia reached out for the diaper bag on Rebekah’s shoulder. Tucked into a zippered pocket in the front were the official papers, signed by the baby’s thirty-eight-year-old maternal grandmother from her semi-permanent residence at the women’s prison in Indianapolis, transferring guardianship from herself to Claudia Modjeski. Signed by Hazel’s attorney, Harold Piper, and a nearly senile judge who frequently lost to Harold at the back-room po
ker game at the Top Cigar and Lunch. Official papers. “He’s mine, actually.”
Judy stood, peered over the counter at Oliver’s sleeping face. “Congratulations, then.” She looked back up at Claudia and raised a single eyebrow.
“I’ll bring in the birth certificate as soon as I get my copy.”
“That’s fine. Oliver, you say?”
Claudia nodded, then watched in fascination as Judy wrote Oliver Modjeski on a piece of stiff paper and slipped it into the colored tab of a manila folder. Just like that.
“Did he”—Judy looked back at the computer screen—“come from a foreign country?”
Rebekah let out a small laugh and headed to the waiting room.
“You could say that,” Claudia answered.
Judy took two clipboards off the wall beside her, handed them to Claudia. “Fill one out for the baby, have your friend fill out the other.”
“I told you, he was my father’s best friend,” Claudia whispered, even though there wasn’t another soul in the waiting room. As she talked she rocked Oliver’s car seat with her foot.
“I know, but how old does that make him?”
“Let’s see, he was a couple years younger than my dad, and he would have been, this year—Gil’s probably seventy-seven.”
“Oh Lord.”
“Rebekah, you have to see a doctor. The baby has to be vaccinated. Gil is where we have to go.”
“We were never vaccinated,” Rebekah said quietly, looking away.
“What did you say?”
