by James Morrow
“Left ovary, two hundred ninety primordials. Right ovary, three hundred ten.”
“Lord…” A high whistle issues from the archbishop, like water vapor escaping a tea kettle. “Does she intend to quit the island?”
“I certainly hope not, Your Grace,” says the priest, wincing at the thought. “She probably has no immediate plans beyond protecting her baby and trying to—”
Connie cuts himself off, intimidated by the sudden arrival of a roly-poly man in a white hooded robe.
“Friar James Wolfe, M.D.,” says the monk.
“Come forward, Friar Doctor James Wolfe,” says Xallibos.
“It would be well if you validated this posthaste.” James Wolfe draws a parchment sheet from his robe and lays it on the archbishop’s desk. Connie steals a glance at the report, hoping to learn the baby’s fertility quotient, but the relevant statistics are too faint. “The priest in question, he’s celebrating Mass in”—sliding a loose sleeve upward, James Wolfe consults his wristwatch—“less than an hour. He’s all the way over in Brookline.”
Striding back to his desk, the archbishop yanks a silver fountain pen from its holder and decorates the parchment with his famous spidery signature.
“Dominus vobiscum, Friar Doctor Wolfe,” he says, handing over the document.
As Wolfe rushes out of the office, Xallibos steps so close to Connie that his nostrils fill with the archbishop’s lemon-scented aftershave lotion.
“That man never has any fun,” says Xallibos, pointing toward the vanishing friar. “What fun do you have, Father Monaghan?”
“Fun, Your Grace?”
“Do you eat ice cream? Follow the fortunes of the Celtics?” He pronounces “Celtics” with the hard C mandated by the Seventh Lateran Council.
Connie inhales a hearty quantity of citrus fumes. “I bake.”
“Bake? Bake what? Bread?”
“Cookies, Your Grace. Brownies, cheesecake, pies. For the Feast of the Nativity, I make gingerbread magi.”
“Wonderful. I like my priests to have fun. Listen, no matter what, the rite must be performed. If Angela Dunfey won’t come to you, then you must go to her.”
“She’ll simply run away again.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps not. I have great faith in you, Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan.”
“More than I have in myself,” says the priest, biting his inner cheeks so hard that his eyes fill with tears.
“No,” says Kate for the third time that night.
“Yes,” insists Stephen, savoring the dual satisfactions of Kate’s thigh beneath his palm and Arbutus rum washing through his brain.
Pinching her cigarette in one hand, Kate strokes Baby Malcolm’s forehead with the other, lulling him to sleep. “It’s wicked,” she protests, placing Malcolm on the rug beside the bed. “A crime against the future.”
Stephen grabs the Arbutus bottle, pours himself another glass, and, adding a measure of Dr. Pepper, takes a greedy gulp. He sets the bottle back on the nightstand, next to Valerie Gallogher’s enigmatic flower.
“Screw the unconceived,” he says, throwing himself atop his wife.
On Friday he’d shown the blossom to Gail Whittington, Dougherty High School’s smartest science teacher, but her verdict had proved unenlightening. Epigaea repens, “trailing arbutus,” a species with at least two claims to fame: it is the state flower of the Massachusetts Archipelago, and it has lent its name to the very brand of alcohol Stephen now consumes.
“No,” says Kate once again. She drops her cigarette on the floor, crushes it with her shoe, and wraps her arms around him. “I’m not ovulating,” she avers, forcing her stiff and slippery tongue into the depths of his mouth. “Your sperm aren’t…”
“Last night, the Holy Father received a vision,” Xallibos announces from the video monitor. “Pictures straight from Satan’s flaming domain. Hell is a fact, friends. It’s as real as a stubbed toe.”
Stephen whips off Kate’s chemise with all the dexterity of Father Monaghan removing a christening gown. The rum, of course, has much to do with their mutual willingness (four glasses each, only mildly diluted with Dr. Pepper), but beyond the Arbutus the two of them have truly earned this moment. Neither has ever skipped Mass. Neither has ever missed a Sacrament of Extramarital Intercourse. And while any act of nonconceptual love technically lay beyond the Church’s powers of absolution, surely Christ would forgive them a solitary lapse. And so they go at it, this sterile union, this forbidden fruitlessness, this coupling from which no soul can come.
“Hedonists dissolving in vats of molten sulfur,” says Xallibos.
The bedroom door squeals open. One of Kate’s middle children, Beatrice, a gaunt six-year-old with flaking skin, enters holding a rude toy boat whittled from a hunk of bark.
“Look what I made in school yesterday!”
“We’re busy,” says Kate, pulling the tattered muslin sheet over her nakedness.
“Do you like my boat, Stephen?” asks Beatrice.
He slams a pillow atop his groin. “Lovely, dear.”
“Go back to bed,” Kate commands her daughter.
“Onanists drowning in lakes of boiling semen,” says Xallibos.
Beatrice fixes Stephen with her receding eyes. “Can we sail it tomorrow on Parson’s Pond?”
“Certainly. Of course. Please go away.”
“Just you and me, right, Stephen? Not Claude or Tommy or Yolanda or anybody.”
“Flaying machines,” says Xallibos, “peeling the damned like ripe bananas.”
“Do you want a spanking?” seethes Kate. “That’s exactly what you’re going to get, young lady, the worst spanking of your whole life!”
The child issues an elaborate shrug and strides off in a huff.
“I love you,” says Stephen, removing the pillow from his privates like a chef lifting the lid from a stew pot.
Again they press together, throwing all they have into it, every limb and gland and orifice, no holds barred, no positions banned.
“Unpardonable,” Kate groans.
“Unpardonable,” Stephen agrees. He’s never been so excited. His entire body is an appendage to his loins.
“We’ll be damned,” she says.
“Forever,” he echoes.
“Kiss me,” she commands.
“Farewell, friends,” says Xallibos. “And keep those kiddies coming!”
Wrestling the baptismal font from the trunk of his car, Connie ponders the vessel’s resemblance to a birdbath—a place, he muses, for pious sparrows to accomplish their avian ablutions. As he sets the vessel on his shoulder and starts away, its edges digging into his flesh, a different metaphor suggests itself. But if the font is Connie’s Cross, and Constitution Road his Via Dolorosa, where does that leave his upcoming mission to Angela Dunfey? Is he about to perform some mysterious act of vicarious atonement?
“Morning, Father.”
He slips the font from his shoulder, standing it up upright beside a fire hydrant. His parishioner Valerie Gallogher weaves amid the mob, dressed in a threadbare woolen parka.
“Far to go?” she asks brightly.
“End of the block.”
“Want help?”
“I need the exercise.”
Valerie extends her arm and they shake hands, mitten clinging to mitten. “Made any special plans for Saint Patrick’s Day?”
“I’m going to bake shamrock cookies.”
“Green?”
“Can’t afford food coloring.”
“I think I’ve got some green—you’re welcome to it. Who’s at the end of the block?”
“Angela Dunfey.”
A shadow flits across Valerie’s face. “And her daughter?”
“Yes,” moans Connie. His throat constricts. “Her daughter.”
Valerie lays a sympathetic hand on his arm. “If I don’t have green, we can probably fake it.”
“Oh, Valerie, Valerie—I wish I’d never taken Holy Orders.”
“We’
ll mix yellow with orange. I’m sorry, Father.”
“I wish this cup would pass.”
“I mean yellow with blue.”
Connie loops his arms around the font, embracing it as he might a frightened child. “Stay with me.”
Together they walk through the serrated March air and, reaching the Warren Avenue intersection, enter the tumbledown pile of bricks labeled No. 47. The foyer is as dim as a crypt. Switching on his penlight, Connie holds it aloft until he discerns the label Angela Dunfey glued to a dented mailbox. He begins the climb to apartment 8-C, his parishioner right behind. On the third landing, Connie stops to catch his breath. On the sixth, he puts down the font. Valerie wipes his brow with her parka sleeve. She takes up the font, and the two of them resume their ascent.
Angela Dunfey’s door is wormy, cracked, and hanging by one hinge. The mere act of knocking swings it open.
They find themselves in the kitchen—a small musty space that would have felt claustrophobic were it not so sparely furnished. A saucepan hangs over the stove; a frying pan sits atop the icebox; the floor is a mottle of splinters, tar paper, and leprous shards of linoleum. Valerie sets the font next to the sink. The basin in which Angela Dunfey washes her dishes, Connie notes, is actually smaller than the one in which the Church of the Immediate Conception immortalizes infertiles.
He tiptoes into the bedroom. His parishioner sleeps soundly, her terrycloth bathrobe parted down the middle to accommodate her groggy, nursing infant; milk trickles from her breasts, streaking her belly with white rivulets. He must move now, quickly and deliberately, so there’ll be no struggle, no melodramatic replay of 1 Kings 3:26, the desperate whore trying to tear her baby away from Solomon’s swordsman.
Inhaling slowly, Connie leans toward the mattress and, with the dexterity of a weasel extracting the innards from an eggshell, slides the barren baby free and carries her into the kitchen.
Beside the icebox Valerie sits glowering on a wobbly three-legged stool.
“Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity,” Connie whispers, casting a wary eye on Valerie, “and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water”—he places the infant on the floor near Valerie’s feet—“I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through this baptism, Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom.”
“Don’t beseech me,” snaps Valerie.
Connie fills the saucepan, dumps the water into the font, and returns to the sink for another load—not exactly holy water, he muses, not remotely chrism, but presumably not typhoidal either, the best the under-budgeted Boston Water Authority has to offer. He deposits the load, then fetches another.
A wide, milky yawn twists Merribell’s face, but she does not cry out.
At last the vessel is ready. “Bless these waters, O Lord, that they might grant this sinner the gift of life everlasting.”
Dropping to his knees, Connie begins removing the infant’s diaper. The first pin comes out easily. As he pops the second, the tip catches the ball of his thumb. Crown of thorns, he decides, feeling the sting, seeing the blood.
He bears the naked infant to the font. Wetting his punctured thumb, he touches Merribell’s brow and draws the sacred plus sign with a mixture of blood and water. “We receive this sinner unto the mystical body of Christ, and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross.”
He begins the immersion. Skullcap. Ears. Cheeks. Mouth. Eyes. O Lord, what a monstrous trust, this power to underwrite a person’s soul. “Merribell Dunfey, I baptize you in the name of the Father…”
Now comes the nausea, excavating Stephen’s alimentary canal as he kneels before the porcelain toilet bowl. His guilt pours forth in a searing flood—acidic strands of cabbage, caustic lumps of potato, glutinous strings of bile. Yet these pains are nothing, he knows, compared with what he’ll experience on passing from this world to the next.
Drained, he stumbles toward the bedroom. Somehow Kate has bundled the older children off to school before collapsing on the floor alongside the baby. She shivers with remorse. Shrieks and giggles pour from the nursery: the preschoolers engaged in a raucous game of Blind Man’s Bluff.
“Flaying machines,” she mutters. Her tone is beaten, bloodless. She lights a cigarette. “Peeling the damned like…”
Will more rum help, Stephen wonders, or merely make them sicker? He extends his arm. Passing over the nightstand, his fingers touch a box of aspirin, brush the preserved Epigaea repens, and curl around the neck of the half-full Arbutus bottle. A ruddy cockroach scurries across the doily.
“I kept Willy home today,” says Kate, taking a drag. “He says his stomach hurts.”
As he raises the bottle, Stephen realizes for the first time that the label contains a block of type headed “The Story of Trailing Arbutus.” “His stomach always hurts.” He studies the breezy little paragraph.
“I think he’s telling the truth.”
Epigaea repens. Trailing arbutus. Mayflower. And suddenly everything is clear.
“What’s today’s date?” asks Stephen.
“Sixteenth.”
“March sixteenth?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tomorrow’s Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“So what?”
“Tomorrow’s Saint Patrick’s Day”—like an auctioneer accepting a final bid, Stephen slams the bottle onto the nightstand—“and Valerie Gallogher will be leaving Boston Isle.”
“Roger’s old teacher? Leaving?”
“Leaving.” Snatching up the preserved flower, he dangles it before his wife. “Leaving…”
“… and of the Son,” says Connie, raising the sputtering infant from the water, “and of the Holy Ghost.”
Merribell Dunfey screeches and squirms. She’s slippery as a bar of soap. Connie manages to wrap her in a dish towel and shove her into Valerie’s arms.
“Let me tell you who you are,” she says.
“Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish.”
“You’re a tired and bewildered pilgrim, Father. You’re a weary wayfarer like myself.”
Dribbling milk, Angela Dunfey staggers into the kitchen. Seeing her priest, she recoils. Her mouth flies open, and a howl rushes out, a cry such as Connie imagines the damned spew forth while rotating on the spits of Perdition. “Not her too! Not Merribell! No!”
“Your baby’s all right,” says Valerie.
Connie clasps his hands together, fingers knotted in agony and supplication. He stoops. His knees hit the floor, crashing against the fractured linoleum. “Please,” he groans.
Angela plucks Merribell from Valerie and affixes the squalling baby to her nipple. “Oh, Merribell, Merribell…”
“Please.” Connie’s voice is hoarse and jagged, as if he’s been shot in the larynx. “Please… please,” he beseeches. Tears roll from his eyes, tickling his cheeks as they fall.
“It’s not her job to absolve you,” says Valerie.
Connie snuffles the mucus back into his nose. “I know.”
“The boat leaves tomorrow.”
“Boat?” Connie runs his sleeve across his face, blotting his tears.
“A rescue vessel,” his parishioner explains. Sliding her hands beneath his armpits, she raises him inch by inch to his feet. “Rather like Noah’s Ark.”
“Mommy, I want to go home.”
“Tell that to your stepfather.”
“It’s cold.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“And dark.”
“Try to be patient.”
“Mommy, my stomach hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My head too.”
“You want an aspirin?”
“I want to go home.”
Is this a mistake? wonders Stephen. Shouldn’t they all be in bed right now instead of tramping around in this nocturnal mist, risking flu and possibly pneumonia? And yet he has faith. Somewhere in the labyrinthine reaches of the Hoosac Do
cks, amid the tang of salt air and the stink of rotting cod, a ship awaits.
Guiding his wife and stepchildren down Pier 7, he studies the possibilities—the scows and barges, the tugs and trawlers, the reefers and bulk carriers. Gulls and gannets hover above the wharfs, squawking their chronic disapproval of the world. Across the channel, lit by a sodium-vapor searchlight, the U.S. Constitution bobs in her customary berth beside Charlestown Navy Yard.
“What’re we doing here, anyway?” asks Beatrice.
“Your stepfather gets these notions in his head.” Kate presses the baby tight against her chest, shielding him from the sea breeze.
“What’s the name of the boat?” asks Roger.
“Mayflower,” answers Stephen.
Epigaea repens, trailing arbutus, mayflower.
“How do you spell it?” Roger demands.
“M-a-y…”
“… f-l-o-w-e-r?”
“Good job, Roger,” says Stephen.
“I read it,” the boy explains indignantly, pointing straight ahead with the collective fingers of his right mitten.
Fifty yards away, moored between an oil tanker and a bait shack, a battered freighter rides the incoming tide. Her stern displays a single word, Mayflower, a name that to the inhabitants of Boston Isle means far more than the sum of its letters.
“Now can we go home?” asks Roger.
“No,” says Stephen. He has taught the story countless times. The Separatists’ departure from England for Virginia… their hazardous voyage… their unplanned landing on Plymouth Rock… the signing of the covenant whereby the non-Separatists on board agreed to obey whatever rules the Separatists imposed. “Now we can go on a nice long voyage.”
“On that thing?” asks Willy.
“You’re not serious,” says Laura.
“Not me,” says Claude.
“Forget it,” says Yolanda.
“Sayonara,” says Tommy.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” says Beatrice.
“It’s not your decision,” Stephen tells his stepchildren. He stares at the ship’s hull, blotched with rust, blistered with decay, another victim of the Deluge. A passenger whom he recognizes as his neighbor Michael Hines leans out a porthole like a prairie dog peering from its burrow. “Until further notice, I make all the rules.”
