and this was when Brother Fire came to the entrance of the room and t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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saw the curate with the pointer raised high, as if he might strike someone with it. But he said, very slowly, as if each word were a separate paragraph, with a tremendous, scary tightness in the muscles along the side of his face: “Going . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
lose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . my. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . temper.” And he brought the pointer down slowly, incrementally with each word, until it was pressed against the desk in front of him. The students stared, wide-eyed, several of them in midspeech, frozen—some, it seemed, trying to call back words already spoken, sounds that had left their lips and were still traveling in the air. Managing that kind of temper, working with it, keeping a calm, in the middle of the frustrations of a busy parish—well, the old priest admires his curate’s bravery in the struggle, knows what it costs him to maintain his cheerful demeanor.
Now, though, he’s about to excuse himself and risk agitating his curate’s brittle threads of good feeling. He has a call he promised to make, he tells the younger man. Another lie. But then he decides he does want to talk to Holly Grey.
She answers on the first ring. And is very quick to dispense with the amenities. “I was about to call you. I was threatening to call you. Let me ask you something, Father. Drunkenness is a sin, is it not?”
“It’s also a sin to judge another,” the old man says gently.
“All right. But I have to deal with it when she does this.”
“Why don’t you put her on.”
He hears a muffled discussion, a back and forth that sounds almost like bantering. He thinks he hears a laugh. Perhaps they’re both realizing, as Brother Fire would say it, how much they love each other.
“She won’t come to the phone.”
“It was pleasant seeing you today,” the Monsignor says.
“I’m sorry to bring it up to you, like this. I really am.”
Brother Fire hears the other woman shout something in the background. It sounds as though it comes from another room.
“Yes I am talking to him, and if you don’t believe me you can come over here and see for yourself.”
A silence. Behind him, in the room, Father McFadden murmurs, “Is everything all right?”
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The Monsignor raises one hand to reassure him.
“Well, I’m truly sorry, Father. She’s not coming to the phone. Is stubbornness a sin?”
“It depends on the circumstances,” Brother Fire tells her. Turning from the telephone table, he observes Father McFadden rise and stretch, and start upstairs with his book. He’s faintly shamed by the wave of relief that comes over him.
3.
Later, joking about having the munchies, the Butterfields decide to order a pizza. He gets up and makes the call.
“Thirty minutes,” he says. Then he seems to staighten, standing there gazing at her. An idea has occurred to him in his happy state.
“Let’s make love,” he says.
“You are stoned,” she says.
“I’m fine. I’m still young. Only— only—forty-eight. And the pizza’s on its way and I want to make love.”
“You’re cute.”
“Come on. Let’s run the risks of love together while the forces of pizza delivery are in motion.” His own figure of speech makes him chuckle.
“I don’t know if I can concentrate if I’m worrying about somebody knocking on the door.”
“But that’s why it’s perfect. Somebody’s rolling the dough right now, and it’ll go in the oven soon, and it’ll cook, and then be boxed and speeding toward us in the dark, and we’ll be meanwhile, um, occupied, coupled and risking getting caught.” He walks over to her, dropping his shirt. “For the roses.”
“Were they a bribe?”
He shakes his head and attempts to keep the exasperation from his voice. “Oh, darling, I’m really not all that calculating. Surely by now you’ve figured that out about me.”
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She shrugs, and rises, and begins to unbutton her blouse.
The two of them move through the house to their bedroom. She leaves the light off and stands in the dim window, removing her blouse.
Butterfield’s laughing hard, struggling to get out of his pants.
“What if the delivery boy’s one of my former students?” she says. “I didn’t think of that.”
“How long ago did I call them?” he asks, laughing. “You want some music? Wait. I’ll hurry.”
Some of her work papers are piled on the stereo in the living room.
It’s part of her nature to be in disarray when she’s working. He removes the papers and opens the cabinet of the stereo.
She comes to the entrance of the hallway in her bra and panties, leans against the frame there, smiling at him. Completely, uncomplicatedly beautiful.
He rummages among the CDs, trying to decide what to play.
“Find something soft,” she says, “so we can hear the door.” Then she giggles. “I feel naughty.”
“Baby,” he says.
“This is fun. What can we call to have delivered tomorrow night?”
Things don’t go well.
Aunt Fiona calls, drunk as a skunk. They hear her slurring on the answering machine about Holly having some sort of breakdown—that’s the word she splutters into the tape. She uses the word emergency and, in fact, she sounds rather terrified. “Fiona,” Elizabeth says, picking up the receiver, “what is it? What’s happened?” She’s straddling Butterfield, who is half-sitting, kissing her left breast.
Fiona shouts something he can’t distinguish.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Elizabeth says.
Butterfield makes a sign of exasperation that she has answered the phone, even under these circumstances. She shrugs at him, and listens.
He can hear the voice, voluble and high-pitched, going on, but he can’t quite distinguish words. He’s inside his dear wife, the long, lovely col-umn of her body atop his own, the soft, warm bed so comfortable be-50
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neath him. He lies back and observes her with the phone held to her ear and wonders at the incongruity of the picture. In the next instant, he discovers something wildly erotic about it, too, lying here in the middle of sex while someone rattles on the telephone. But it’s his great-aunt on the phone. Jesus. Putting Fiona far from his mind, he follows the soft beauty of Elizabeth’s abdomen to the place where her legs are spread, and he thinks about the whole principle of femininity—what a glorious creation, perfectly divine, the most beauteous gift, the greatest, primal, blessed reason for existence—and he reaches up to touch her breasts.
“You called who?” Elizabeth says, lifting herself from him, disengaging. There’s the exquisite open lusciousness of her legs, and then they close and she has gotten around to a sitting position. Gazing at the faint suggestion of the bones of her long spine, he runs his hand up the very center of it, and she reaches back and takes his wrist. “Slow down, Aunt Fiona. Please. Can you speak a little slower? You called the police?”
She stands, looks back at Butterfield, and frowns, signaling for him to get up. Then she holds one hand over the speaker part of the phone and says, “Hurry and get dressed. Your mother’s on the roof.”
“Fiona’s playing a joke.”
Elizabeth waves this away. “Listen, Fiona—will you stop yelling and call them back? Tell them it’s a false alarm. Tell them you made a mistake. But will you please do what I said? I’m going to hang up now.”
Butterfield steps to the closet, opens the door and stands there, naked. For the moment, he can’t decide where to begin. Elizabeth talks to Fiona, trying to calm her. He stirs at last, strides over to his bureau and puts on a clean pair of underwear.
“Blotto,” Eliza
beth says, putting the phone down, still naked, sitting on the side of the bed. “But your mother’s on the roof. And she refuses to come down. Fiona says she’s just sitting there. And she’s called the police.”
“I say let her sit.”
Elizabeth’s face registers incredulity. It’s such a pretty face, and Butterfield finds himself merely standing there appreciating it. This annoys her. She gathers the blankets around herself. “Come on, Will. She might fall. The police are coming.”
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“She climbed up there, didn’t she? She’s done this kind of thing before.”
“Climbed roofs?”
“Remember that first night they were here, and she got mad at Fiona and locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out?”
“She went up on the roof that night?”
“She talked about getting away from Fiona in her mood. She locked herself away. It’s the same thing isn’t it?”
“Stop it, Will.”
“Well, that’s how they get. You know it. She isn’t going anywhere.
She’s where everyone can see her. At least she won’t disappear. She did that once, too. Three days. I thought it was the first Elizabeth all over again. Turns out she slept in her office and bought new clothes every lunch hour so she wouldn’t have to come home. Fiona was frantic. I was frantic because I was alone with Fiona.”
“I can’t believe this,” Elizabeth says. “So you’re just going to stand there and not do anything? Your mother’s up on the roof of the house, Will. And there are police on their way.”
“I was so happy,” he tells her, turning, abruptly feeling that he ought to cover himself.
On the way out of the house, they run into the pizza deliveryman.
Elizabeth pushes past him, and starts along the sidewalk, calling back that she’ll walk over there and for Butterfield to catch up. Butterfield fishes around in his pockets for the money. The deliveryman holds the pizza in its box and stares at him with an expression that gives forth all sorts of irritability and questioning. When the phone rings, the man actually shifts a little, as if startled. Something about the urgency of Elizabeth’s exit has upset him. Butterfield offers him the money and says,
“Keep it.”
“The change?”
“The pizza. Keep the pizza,” Butterfield says.
“You didn’t order pizza?”
“No—yes. We don’t want it.”
“Well, I don’t want it. Your phone’s ringing.”
“I paid for it,” Butterfield says. “But you can keep it. I know about the phone.”
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“I can’t keep the pizza, bud.”
The phone rings with an insistence, that edge of crisis always created by an unanswered phone. Its jangling grates on his nerves. He hears the exasperation in his own voice. “But we don’t want it. We can’t eat it now.”
“You couldn’t put it in the refrigerator or something?”
“I don’t want the fucking pizza,” Butterfield says. “Take the money.”
The man takes the money, then sets the pizza down on the porch step and walks off.
Butterfield calls after him. “Hey.”
Nothing.
He lifts the pizza in its box, carries it into the kitchen, and puts it on the counter. The phone is still clamoring. He picks up the receiver.
“What?” It’s Fiona.
“Thas’ how you answer your phone?”
“I knew who it was, Fiona. I had no trouble guessing who it would be.”
“Your mother’s gone off th’deep end.”
Something stirs in his stomach. “She fell off the roof ?”
“She’s sitt’n up there an’ says she’s gonna stay all night. Watch th’stars, she says. Purity of the universe. Crazy.”
“Fiona, we’re coming right over. Don’t call here again. No one will be here.”
“I called th’ p’lice,” she says. “Tell Elizabeth. The p’lice are coming.”
“You were supposed to call them and tell them not to come. Remember?”
“Coming. Hear the sirens now.”
“Jesus. Elizabeth’s on her way over there.”
“Woman’s crazy, s’what she is. You should see’er. Sitt’n up there like it’s not crazy to be sitt’n on a roof in your pajamas.”
“Fiona, she’s in her pajamas?”
“Sitt’n there to spite me. Drawing attention to herself. I wouldn’t clean up th’glass and I call th’radio to put in my two cents, so she went and got th’step ladder and climbed up on th’roof and pulled the goddamn ladder up after her an’ I called th’ police. So she can deal with that. They’ll be here any minute.”
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“How much have you had to drink?” Butterfield asks her.
“She says she wants t’look at th’stars. Imagine’at.” The line clicks shut.
“Fiona?”
Nothing. He stands there with a profound urge to walk out the door and head in the opposite direction, anywhere. It actually occurs to him to let Elizabeth handle it—or, more accurately, he feels that his abandonment of the two old women in this particular episode would be mit-igated by the fact that Elizabeth is already dealing with it. He’s aware of this as a form of cowardice, and so he rejects it, and even so he can’t bring himself to start.
The aroma of the baked cheese and tomato rises to his nostrils. Exquisitely appetizing, even in this distress. After all, he hasn’t eaten since two o’clock in the afternoon. Opening the box, he takes out a slice and begins gingerly to eat it. A small bite. A little something to tide him over. He’ll carry a slice in a folded napkin to Elizabeth. It’s a God-given right to eat when hungry if there’s food. It’s a sin to let food go to waste.
The pizza, something about which he has been little more than indifferent since he was fifteen years old, tastes better than he can ever remember. It’s as if he’s lost all the years between his first experience of it and now. The whole of his palate is trembling with the enjoyment of it, that wonderful layer of melted cheese, moist with tomato and oil, and the crisp little round lozenges of pepperoni. It fills his whole mouth.
Somewhere out in the night, he hears sirens, and he starts out, but then comes back, agitated now, wrapping a piece for Elizabeth, and then deciding to eat it himself. He wolfs it down, breathing back through his mouth to cool it, standing guiltily in the entrance to the living room.
His mother is sitting on the roof of the house on Temporary Road, and he has the nearly petulant sense that this crisis can wait the one minute it will take him to wolf down another small slice of pizza. Reaching hurriedly into the refrigerator, he brings out a can of beer and opens that, gulping down most of it. Beer has never tasted so good, either. He washes down the rest of the second slice.
Holly and Fiona’s house is only a five-minute walk away. The two old women have worked the little flower garden in the front all summer, 54
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though the lawn is in disrepair, the grass overgrown and patchy. The only time the two women seem in concord—and it always seems to be perfect concord—is working that little oasis of order in the tangle of the yard, while music plays on the small transistor radio they keep on the little porch. They talk about happy things—being girls together down at Sweet Briar College; living in Brussels, Paris, and Cairo. You would never dream from seeing them in this pastoral harmony that in an hour or two they might be at each other’s throats over the Middle East, or the impeachment, or even something as inconsequential as whether to use dry or fresh-cut parsley, or whether the air conditioning is at the right setting.
Butterfield makes his way over there at a slow trot, still hearing sirens. Like most people who don’t use their time well, he has misjudged how much has elapsed since the pizza man walked away from the door.
As he approaches along the street, he sees peo
ple standing out on their lawns, and Elizabeth just below where his mother sits with elbows clasping raised knees, at the edge of the roof. Everybody’s watching the show.
There’s been enough time for all these people to gather. He makes his way to Elizabeth, saying her name softly. Elizabeth only glances at him.
“Holly please listen,” she says.
“Mother,” Butterfield says. “What’re you doing?”
No answer. The old woman stares at him, squinting slightly.
Elizabeth turns and takes his sleeve. “What took you so long? It’s been almost twenty minutes.”
“No it hasn’t.” He remembers that he had planned to bring her a slice of the pizza. “Has it?” he says. “Fiona called. I had to deal with Fiona.”
She steps back from him. “Hey. Is that—did you—?”
“I wolfed a little of the pizza, yes. I was going to bring you a slice.
It’s an inalienable right to eat when hungry, Elizabeth.”
“I smell inalienable beer, too.”
“Had to wash it down with something.” He looks around for the emergency vehicles, the sirens of which are nearing. He looks up at his mother. “This is ridiculous. Mother, come down from there. You’re upsetting the whole neighborhood.”
“For God’s sake,” Elizabeth says, hands on hips. “For God’s—sweet Jesus Christ’s—sake.”
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“I had to deal with the pizza man,” he says to her, low. “You left me there.”
“What did you—have a beer together? Watch part of a ball game?
This is your mother, Will, not mine.”
He says nothing to this.
“If you two are finished with your marital spat,” Holly says from the roof, “I’m still up here. I’m still sitting high up on the roof.”
He looks up at her again. “Oh, and it’s important to you, is it, that we have to contend with that. Is that right, Mom? And what age would that be most like, speaking purely on an emotional level? What grade in the elementary school is that?”
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