The Next Queen of Heaven: A Novel

by Gregory Maguire

  “I’ll send you a telegram the day it happens.”

  “Look, but the timing of this has gotten really dicey. What’re you going to do if Sean starts fading the day before the competition?”

  He had thought of this. “Sean told me what he wanted me to do. But how about you?”

  “Germy, you know the answer. If it comes to that, you’ll have to wing it in Manhattan on your own. Even if this is your once-in-a-lifetime.”

  “I get it.” Jeremy dangled the spoon over his coffee. “Maybe he’ll hold on till after the twenty-first.”

  Marty started humming “New York, New York.”

  “If you begin to croon I will pitch this scalding coffee in your face.”

  “You sound as if you’ve been taking correspondence courses in New Yawk courtesy.” Singing. “Start spreading the shit. Fuhgeddaboudit. You’ll make a great big fart of it—hey, don’t take it personally, Jeremy. Come back.”

  At least someone’s going to miss me, thought Jeremy, not turning back.

  He’d gone home, finished his resignation letters to Father Mike and the school, taken an hour to get up the nerve to post them, and then, Willem in his thoughts, had not been able to sleep and find Willem in his dreams.

  He was glad that the reception was in a church basement where the wine wasn’t expected to flow liberally, if at all. Though that punch might be many-colored, none of the colors was spiked. He couldn’t have dared a tipsy farewell. One stray tear and he’d have to kill himself.

  At least Polly and Caleb appeared to agree about avoiding the hokeypokey and the tossed bouquet and newlyweds cramming cake into each other’s mouths the way, presumably, they were expected to cram themselves in a matter of hours. None of that seemed in the cards. Still, Jeremy stayed on high alert, poised to escape to the men’s room if all bachelors were conscripted to vie for the honor of catching a flung garter.

  He felt rather than saw the lanky electricity of Kirk Scales seated at the other end of the long folding table, but Kirk was making no attempt to come closer. Kirk’s fixation would begin to fizzle out the moment Jeremy’s getaway actually took—if without turning back Jeremy made it to his friends who lived in the Albany area tonight, and to New York City tomorrow. If, if. If, on January 21st, the cabaret showcase went well and there was one, at least one, only one little crumb of encouragement—then last night had been his last night in Thebes, and the wedding marked his divorce from Willem, whether Willem knew it or not. Kirk would just have to deal.

  Francesca and Irene came along, laughing, plastic cups of sherbet sludge in their hands; Willem followed. He’d shucked his jacket but wore his daughter Charlotte sitting atop his shoulders, and he carried Bartholomew in his arms. The perfect Handelaers stopped and parked themselves at Jeremy’s end of the table. Irene blocked Kirk out. Kirk shifted to watch. “The man of the hour,” said Willem. “Music sounded great, Jeremy.”

  “That’s Irene for you, a pro,” said Jeremy. Irene flashed him a hateful smile. Jeremy knew she hadn’t admired her own middle tone, and was just a good enough singer to find herself wanting.

  “Polly liked it, or said she did,” Irene said.

  “Trust her. Catholic brides aren’t allowed to lie on their wedding day.”

  “Tripe and nonsense. I’m sure even Catholic virgins say, Darling, it was everything I ever dreamed of, while really dreaming of Antonio Banderas a third of the way out of his 2(x)ists.”

  “Say hi to Jeremy,” said Willem to Charlotte. “Give him a kiss? Hmmm?”

  Surely Willem wasn’t going to play this game in front of his wife?

  “No,” said sensible Charlotte, and drove her gummy chin into her father’s dirty blond head. In children, thought Jeremy, remain the last hopes of salvation for the world.

  “I’ll give you one, Jeremy,” said Francesca, and did. “Like it or not.”

  “I do,” he said. “Happy millennium.”

  “We made it through Y2K, didn’t we? Bit of a snooze, all that panic. What are your New Year’s resolutions? Hope you’ve broken them all; it’s January 15 already.”

  “I hate New Year’s Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven’t yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn’t matter.”

  She wasn’t listening. She had taken Bartholomew from Willem and was playing with him. “Well, I’m going to learn to do trapunto stitchery, I think. It’s either that or calligraphy.”

  “Me, I’m going to ski more,” said Willem. “Do you ski, Jeremy? They’ve smartened up the runs at Gore Mountain. We could go for an overnight sometime. A good day on the slopes, then kicking back by the fire.” He lifted Charlotte off his back and set her down at a plate.

  “And leave me with the kids. You monster. You’re already kicked back,” said Francesca. “Got that down cold.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  Charlotte was giggling and mashing a sandwich. Jeremy stole a glance at Willem as he bent his head over his daughter’s silver-blond hair. He was so far away, even when he was only four feet over. Willem scent—sweat and soap and laundry powder and a teasing lick of vetiver, a whiff of the past. Willem there and not there, the most heady paradox. Song alone had a chance of presenting The Mystical Body of Desire with any hope of accuracy.

  Jeremy blinked and turned away. At the other end of the table Kirk Scales was shaking his head—probably putting two and two together. Even a high school sophomore could find himself appalled by Jeremy.

  He excused himself and went to stand by the emergency door that Pastor Huyck had opened for air. Behind him, a fiddle was being tuned, a microphone tapped. Dancing at this do? They’d have to push the tables back. The late afternoon January sky was glowing royal blue two-thirds along, and the west was red carnation and gold. “I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind,” said a voice farther out the door—a person partway up the concrete stairwell leading to the parking lot. He hadn’t seen her.

  “Oh, Tabitha,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She shrugged, but he wasn’t going back in there until he found his bearings. She didn’t own the place. Across the lot, the blue plastic tarps on the roof of Our Lady’s looked like swimming pool liners. A smell of char still lingered, three weeks and several storms regardless. “Glad to see your mom is better,” he said. “That was some performance she put on.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her to have planned the whole stupid thing,” said Tabitha. “That’s what it was, you know. A big fake-out. She decided to play the baby to teach me something. Well, it backfired, because she got replaced by a better baby.” She had a smaller voice, more defensive, than he’d heard before. Wasn’t she glad her mom was restored?

  “I thought the nuns would have multiple heart attacks. For a moment Mother Clare du Plessix thought it was the Spirit of the Foundress actually coming up from the crypt.”

  “Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”

  “You’re shivering, why are you out here?”

  “I want a smoke.”

  “You’re not smoking though.”

  “I want one, I’m not having one. This is the next best thing.”

  He didn’t try to figure her out. “Not a good day, I’m guessing?”

  “Good, bad, you lose track what’s what.”

  “Yeah, I know about that.”

  The band started. A jug band of a sort, Adirondack hillbilly jazz. “You don’t want to dance, I guess?” he said.

  “Got that right. I hate this kind of crap. Why at weddings does everybody think they’re the fucking Waltons.”

  “Did your brother start the fire?”

  “Did you? Just to be able to blame him and get him off your case?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then,” she said, as if that was conclusive.

  “You are shivering. Come on in. It’s freezing out here.”

  They peered in. Caleb and Polly were dragging through their first dance. It was that song from Cats. “No. They’re right there.”
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  “Come around. We can stand in the vestibule and watch from a distance.”

  They tramped through the snow to the front of the Cliffs of Zion Radical Radiant Pentecostal Church. Polly and Caleb must have broken off their dance early. The caller was hooting and stoking the applause, and rousing up folks to come and do a square dance. In the well-heated vestibule, with a doubtful look Francesca Handelaers was sniffing Bartholomew’s diapers. “He’s just got the most perfectly incredible schedule of production,” she said as Tabitha and Jeremy knocked the snow off their shoes. “Am I in your way?”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “I’m happy on the margins.”

  “Me too,” said Francesca, eyes on her work, then, “but I never really believed that of you, Jeremy.”

  “Coming through,” said Tabitha, giving the baby a horrified scowl and wrinkling her nose, and darting for the women’s room.

  Jeremy sat on the stairs, inching back into the shadows. Peculiar that, so much of the time, he found Francesca’s company more comfortable than Willem’s. She laid a fresh diaper out on the floor and began to undo Bartholomew’s purple leggings. She talked about a New Year’s party they’d had—why hadn’t Jeremy come to it? He’d been visiting Sean? Reading to him? Oh, Sean. Right.

  Irene showed up, a pile of squished sandwiches pinched between her thumb and forefinger, and Charlotte in tow with her other hand. “Anything I can do?” she said to her sister.

  “Get your niece to eat something, this is supper.” Francesca grabbed Bartholomew’s feet in one hand and lifted his legs like a couple of trout, so his little smeared bottom rose from the messy diaper. “Pee—ew, Bartholomew.”

  A clatter; Willem came bouncing through the door, all angles and cheer. “It’s a square dance, they’re looking to fill another square, ‘Cesca,” he said.

  “Got my hands full just now, honey,” said Francesca. “As you can see.”

  “Irene, then. Come on, I’m hot to dance.”

  “Not me. I performed once today. I’m done.”

  As Irene shifted in the doorway and the light fell further Willem caught sight of Jeremy sitting there. A beat of silence, a fermata, then the yowl of the caller pleading for another pair. Francesca said, “Maybe Jeremy wants to dance.”

  “Oh, I don’t know that he wants it that much,” said Willem.

  “Maybe I do,” said Jeremy. The beginning and the end. “Why not ask?”

  “Go mad. I’ll be done in a bit,” said Francesca.

  “Civil unions passed in Vermont,” said Jeremy. He felt he was channeling an archangel. Or Sean. “Almost a month ago. In the next door state. It’s the new millennium.”

  Willem looked at Jeremy with a turned head. Willem’s fabulous family around him like shackles and safety netting both. “Well,” said Willem almost gingerly, “do you want to dance?”

  Jeremy levitated across the messy baby and Francesca’s deft hands, and Willem caught his elbow and pulled him up the steps. They stood, chests facing, Willem’s head turned one way and Jeremy’s the other. Two meerkats defending their honor, thought Jeremy. Looking for predators. Avoiding looking in the eye, though their chins were seven inches apart.

  Willem braved up first. Grabbed Jeremy by the forearm. “Guess we’re about to give this old town a stir.” A blush rose from beneath his loosened shirt collar. “I’m going to be the man, though.”

  “Works for me,” said Jeremy. “I’ll sing soprano.”

  They took their place in the final square. Jack Reeves with his wife. Turk Schaeffer was paired up with Svetty Boyle—who knew? Old Man Getchen and his daughter Stephanie. A flurry of snickering round the edges of the room. “Men to the left, ladies to the right, let’s walk through these steps first,” said the caller. “Gentlemen, take your lady’s left in your left hand, squeeze it so she’ll understand, Place your right upon her waist, Show her you’ve got excellent—” The guitarist was doing a fret-thump, to mark the beat, no melody yet. The caller fumbled. “Whoa, Nellie, we got a snafu on our hands. What, no pretty lady available to fill out this figure over here?”

  The caller’s remark took an interrogative twist into silence; people craned to see. Willem remarked in an uninflected voice, “We’re okay as we are; go on.”

  “Well.” The caller was flummoxed. “I’ve seen everything now. I guess. I’ll just call it out. Okay now. Where were we? Swing your gal—I mean swing your partner, swing her through … Holy cripes.” He mopped his brow. “Folks, I can only call this the way I know it. You’re gonna be innovative, you’re just gonna have to follow as you can.”

  Willem swung his partner, swung him through; Jeremy bowed and held on and flourished. They caught their eyes together, and grinned, which changed the nature of the sidelines tittering; transformed it into applause, at least as Jeremy heard it.

  The dance began in earnest, and the partners set out to follow their steps. Twelve measures in, Jeremy remembered that in square dancing you changed partners; you were swept in recurring waves around the edge of your world, until you came home. With a look of pre-cardiac trauma, Jeremy’s landlord, Old Man Getchen, took Jeremy’s hand in his own, and handled him as gingerly as he could manage. Turk Schaeffer was more willing to play, as long as he was caught in the joke—“You’re a vixen in your dancing shoes, you are,” he said, and gave Jeremy a pinch on the cheek. The wedding guests cheered, the room whirled as Jeremy circled. Past Polly and Caleb, Polly clapping with surprise and glee, Caleb looking as if he had died. Past Caleb’s drunken friends hooting up a storm, Hogan Scales among them now. Past Kirk, his eyes wide with surprise or delight or dismay, it was hard to tell. Past Old Lady Scarcese and Mrs. Chanarinjee, whispering. Past Linda Pearl Wasserman in a Hairdo of Beauty. Past Father Mike looking the other way diplomatically. Past Pastor Jakob Huyck, who stood like a man surprised by sensing a gun in the small of his back, as Leontina Scales cabled her arm through his and tilted into the icebox of his chest.

  Past Irene Menengest, looking wary, hauling Bartholomew; past Francesca Handelaers coming along behind, grinning and nodding her head in time to the music and bouncing Charlotte against her, who spotted her dad, and laughed to see such sport. Round to Jack Reeves one last time, round home to Willem, who by now was flushed lobster red under sunrise wheat-sheaf hair, taking his partner, taking him home, no more need to ramble ‘n’ roam.

  THE MUSIC WAS still in Jeremy’s head several hours later, when he reached out the car window to grab a ticket from the Thruway attendant. He hated country music as much as Tabitha had said she did, though for different reasons; yet there had seemed little so wonderful, ever, as that crazy kindergarten rhythm, and Willem—for a moment of reprieve—willing to be in full swim. With him.

  Did he know? Had he seen it in Jeremy’s eyes? That a wedding was an ending as well as a beginning, that Jeremy was on his way?

  Stars out there beyond the windshield. It was late, the traffic thin, and the country was only farmland on either side of the Mohawk River. Not much light pollution. He’d headed out of Thebes under the speed-trap camera, barreled along the ridge road to the entrance for I-81 southbound, and now continued coursing along the Thruway east toward Little Falls, Amsterdam, Schenectady, Albany. The snow under the stars looked like Styrofoam. Diamonds in the headlights. It was almost as if it was his honeymoon, driving away from a wedding reception so late, and heading so far.

  To clear the froth of pleasure from his head, he sang part of an old song he’d written, years earlier. It was another Willem song. I’m singing it to deliver myself of it, he told himself.

  He let the last note hold out, but it wobbled at the end—a bad sign, would he wobble at the competition? A problem for another day. There was something about words and music together that allowed humans to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

  “It’s a weird song,” said Tabitha. She’d been thinking abou
t it then. First thing she’d said in a half an hour. He thought she’d been dozing. “I can’t tell if it’s about God or about someone you care about.”

  “Neither can I,” he answered. “Or both.”

  “Isn’t that super-sincere kind of music kind of, uh, old-fashioned?”

  Everyone’s a critic. “Maybe,” he said.

  She sighed. Jeremy guessed she didn’t really care about music. She just wanted the ride, and she had to put up with it. “You know what song I like?” she said. “That Frank Sinatra one.” She began to hum in a painfully tuneless way. “Da da, da-da da, da da, da-da da …” She patted her stomach. “What I like about that song is that it seems like you count. You go to New York to count. To be counted. To add up.”

  “You don’t go to New York to sleep on the street, I hope.”

  “We’ll find something.”

  “You’ll find something. I’m only doing this as a favor, you know. We can stop tonight at my friends who live outside Albany. Then tomorrow night in New York City I have a place to stay, but only briefly. You can crash there one night, I bet, but you have to find someplace else after that.”

  “We’ll find something,” she said again. “We’ll get counted. You, me, and the baby.”

  “I’m glad you called home and left a message so they wouldn’t worry.”

  “I talked to Kirk. I didn’t tell him who I was traveling with.”

  Kirk would figure it out. Jeremy had been pulling himself together behind the Dumpster—trying to resist those few threatening tears—when Tabitha cornered him and asked him for a ride. Kicked Jeremy into the new millennium. As they were backing out of the parking space, Jeremy had caught sight of Hogan Scales coming to the door and taking it all in. His face registered something dark—Jeremy had seen it as threatening, and split. But thinking back on it now, maybe Hogan was sharper than he seemed. Knowing his sister so well, maybe he’d imagined what Jeremy hadn’t yet deciphered: no way that Tabitha would exit the vehicle until they’d cleared the Thebes town limits by several hours.

  So that menace on Hogan’s face perhaps was really a sharply rising ache. He was her little brother, after all. “Did you tell Kirk when you’d be home?”