The Next Queen of Heaven

by Gregory Maguire

But the section—accidentally, of course, for God hadn’t inspired the Bible to be interesting—the section wasn’t too bad. It was sort of like a fairy tale. A magic fish in it, if she was getting the point, and a guardian angel.

  The story was too good. Her mom’s eyes looked bright and gummy, like coffee candies after they’ve been sucked for the first couple of minutes. She was training her gaze on her daughter like a hawk. Double damn. Tabitha tried to make her voice sound boring, but Mrs. Scales just seemed to listen all the harder.

  Tabitha had picked too compelling a section. She purposely flipped over a couple of pages and began to read from something more suitably dreadful—the top of the page said KINGS—but her mom began to moan and paw at the book. She was actually following the story of Tobit, then. Tabitha had to turn back and find out where she’d left off.

  When the story was done, her mom closed her eyes in satisfaction. She wasn’t asleep, but at least she wasn’t looking. Tabitha reached down and gripped the staple gun. On your mark. Get set.

  The phone rang. Triple damn! Mrs. Scales’s eyes flew open. “Waaaaaaah,” she said, like I Love Loooosy screwing up again.

  “Tabitha!” It was Hogan. Goddamn it, wasn’t he gone yet? “Tabitha, it’s for you. It’s Daddy Casey.”

  She dropped the Bible. She pulled the towel down over her mother’s eyes, and ran out of the room, hugging the paper bag with the staple gun to her belly. Before she got to the phone she knew already that Daddy Casey was going to be no help. Dads didn’t do help. Ask Jesus Christ himself. Hanging on the cross, hung out to dry, he must have waited and waited for his Heavenly Father to come in the nick of time. Ha.

  24

  AFTER MASS ON the Sunday following the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Jeremy headed across the parking lot. It had snowed the night before, three powdery inches, and the old geezers were being cautious on the blacktop. Polly Osterhaus and Peggy Mueller caught up with Jeremy as he waited in the line snaking toward the doors leading into the downstairs Assembly Room of the Radical Radiants.

  “If Thebes had anything that approximated a real mall, instead of that strip mall wannabe called Crosswinds, we hard-boiled holiday shoppers wouldn’t have to make do with Radical Radiant handicrafts,” muttered Peggy. “Ames is all well and good, but a trip to Syracuse and Watertown can be treacherous this time of year.”

  “Face it,” whispered Polly, “the Radiantics have better small muscle coordination. Their potholders are in peppier colors. More fringe on their afghans.”

  “Hey there, we Catholics do better macramé remote sleeves,” objected Jeremy.

  “Yes. And just who needs a remote sleeve? You can’t see through them to change the channels.”

  “Then you use them to store your extra bacon. Of a Sunday morning.”

  The atmosphere was one of manufactured mirth. Jeremy thought the Catholic husbands, trailing behind their wives, were looking dubious. Probably, he guessed, their Catholic wives spent money in the name of ecumenism and because this was a better grade of goods. The Pentecostal wives seem to have perfected a semblance of shyness and even indifference—“Oh, do you really want that old thing? Mercy, you’re being charitable again; let me wrap it up for you ’cause I just can’t stand even to look at it anymore.” Jeremy heard one Catholic woman say to her husband, “You old grouch. They send all their kids to Our Lady’s June Fair. It evens out.”

  “So,” said Peggy Mueller, “I hear that someone else is doing the music for your wedding, Polly.”

  “An old friend,” replied Polly with, thought Jeremy, supremely well-calibrated nonchalance. “Irene Menengest. You don’t know her, I think?”

  “Does she go to Our Lady’s?” said Peggy, who must know that if Irene Menengest went to Our Lady’s and had a singing voice she’d be in the choir already. Jeremy would have insisted on it.

  “No, she’s not a Catholic.”

  “Oh is that so. Jeremy, is that allowed?”

  “Of course it’s allowed,” said Jeremy. “Really, Peggy. Polly can have the Village People if she wants. The only restriction comes in the choice of material, and Polly’s chosen some nice stuff.”

  “I hope you’re coming, Peggy,” continued Polly. “We’re still waiting for your RSVP.”

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away, but unfortunately I didn’t marry into a family of wild horses. I married into the Mueller clan. There’s talk of a post-Christmas Christmas party that weekend.”

  “I figured there’d be lots of that type of complication. Which is one reason I didn’t try to engage the choir for the wedding. After all the holiday rehearsals, the concert material leading up to the midnight mass, and so on—who needs another obligation?”

  Peggy said, “How thoughtful you are. Now Caleb—it is Caleb Briggs, isn’t it?—he’s not Catholic, is he?”

  “He’s thinking of converting, but we’re not waiting for that.”

  “In the old days you’d have needed a dispensation to marry outside the faith.”

  “You aren’t old enough to know the old days,” said Jeremy. “Really, Peggy.”

  “My mother needed a dispensation to marry my father because he hadn’t made his Easter Duty the year before.”

  “Shocking,” said Jeremy, “I didn’t know you were a child of sin.”

  “He was in a wheelchair for eighteen months following an industrial accident at the paper mill. Don’t change the subject. I want to hear more about Caleb. How’d you meet him, Polly?”

  The line moved forward bit by bit. “All the good stuff is going to be snapped up by these sharp old ladies,” replied Polly. “Oh, I met him around town. You know, he’s not even religious. He’s … he’s sort of nothing.” As if eager to change the subject, she swiveled to Jeremy. “How’re the rehearsals going with Irene?”

  “She’s got a nice voice,” he answered. “I can see why you trust her. She’s a little tentative in the upper registers, but she’s got decent volume and a pretty sure pitch.”

  “Sounds lovely,” said Peggy. “You should sign her up, Jeremy.”

  “I don’t know, we don’t see eye to eye.” And besides, he thought, maybe pretty soon it’ll be someone else’s problem.

  They were in at last. The queue snaked at the pace of a buffet line. It was embarrassing to spend five minutes in front of a card table selling old Barbie dolls with crocheted hoop skirts à la Scarlett O’Hara, beneath which you were intended to store an extra roll of toilet paper. “Bathroom Barbies,” they were called. Their legs fit right in the cardboard tube. But Jeremy didn’t want to spend eight dollars on a Bathroom Barbie, and he didn’t want to meet the eye of the clever Radical Radiant Pentecostal craftswoman who had spent all year buying old Barbies at Catholic yard sales and turning them into moneymakers for the Cliffs of Zion.

  “Are you still rehearsing with Irene?” said Polly after a while, considering a sad little potholder that looked pre-scorched.

  “One time more, maybe two,” said Jeremy. “I had to order some sheet music from Iowa City, and it hasn’t come in yet. So we’ve got stuff to work on still.”

  The line advanced along a display of potted cacti made out of stuffed denim. “Pin cushions,” said the saleswoman. “Cacti are already prickly, you see, so they don’t mind being pricked some more.”

  “Me either,” said Jeremy. “But I don’t sew much, myself.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Well, I don’t have a wife.”

  “I should get it for you and show you how to sew,” said Peggy, leaning forward. “Someone without a wife shouldn’t suffer so.”

  “I’m not exactly suffering,” said Jeremy, but thought, Really, what other word would I use?

  “Hi, hey, it’s you,” said someone, in his face almost, and Jeremy reared back to register the kid brother in that basket case of a family.

  “Oh, hi,” said Jeremy, “um, Kirk.”

  “Hi. Whatcha doing here?”

  “Well, um, realizing I don’t have enough mon
ey for a stuffed cactus,” said Jeremy, glancing at the saleswoman, who had arbitrarily picked one up and was poised to wrap it in a sheet of newspaper.

  “He doesn’t have a wife,” explained the saleswoman.

  “Oh, you don’t?” said Kirk. “That’s too bad.” He looked thrilled.

  Polly pushed from behind. Jeremy was trapped and uneasy. The kid stood inches from him, their belt buckles were almost touching, and though he was cute in that sort of coltish way Jeremy didn’t want either Kirk’s attention or his warm breath so near. Jeremy’s glasses were fogging up. “It’s nice to have some Catholics here,” said Kirk. “You should come more often.”

  Jeremy glanced around for an escape route. “How’s your mom?”

  The boy’s face clouded over. Jeremy relented. “I hope she’s feeling okay. I liked meeting your family.”

  “We liked you, all of us did. You should come back. I could show you the song for the high school Shakespeare and maybe you could tutor me. I need help at the singing part. I’m being the Fool. I have to wear diagonal colors, and jingles on my feet. I have to prance.”

  “Jeremy could tutor you at that,” said Peggy, “or I’m available. We’re all fools here. I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  Kirk turned pink and put both his hands on Jeremy’s chest, like a dog about to lick his master’s nose. “Would you, do you think? I need a teacher.”

  Jeremy backed up into Peggy Mueller’s bosom.

  “Steady,” said Peggy.

  “Please,” said Jeremy, “can we put it off? The Christmas season is so busy, and there’s so much going on—”

  But this was the kid with the crazy mother, and there was no subtlety of expectation in his eyes; it was all or nothing, and nothing was beginning to show on his face. “I’ll see,” said Jeremy, panicking, “maybe. I’m sure you’re better than you think. Isn’t there a music coach in the high school?”

  “Oh well, if you call that music.” Kirk backed off, and looked hurt, and managed, being a slender kid and a Radical Radiant, to slip off through the crowd. He paused halfway up some steps to the stage area and looked back over his shoulder balefully at Jeremy. His jeans were so tight his bum looked inflated, as if it would squeak like a bathtub toy if you pinched it.

  “All things to all people,” singsonged Polly Osterhaus. “That’s our Jeremy.”

  “I can’t take this, I’m not giving any Christmas presents this year,” said Jeremy, “so help me God, it isn’t worth it. All that unfettered—enthusiasm—”

  “There you are,” said Sister Alice Coyne. “Mercy, this is a mob scene. What, you’re not buying? That’s not very ecumenical of you.”

  “You think the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mysteries want a Bathroom Barbie for Christmas?”

  “Probably not. Jeremy, I’ve a phone message for you, it just came in at the parish house, and I thought I might find you here.” Sister Alice consulted a scrap of paper in her hand. “It was from Martin Rothbard. He said to tell you something about Sean; he’s got an infection or something.”

  Jeremy was halfway across the parking lot to the rectory when Kirk Scales showed up at his side. “I thought you were maybe looking for me,” he said.

  “I wasn’t,” said Jeremy.

  “You can call me. I am free on Tuesdays. I need help.”

  “Yes,” said Jeremy. You sure do. He sprinted to the parish house steps.

  At the office Jeremy called the Riley house, but Sean’s mother sounded calm and undistressed. “Oh, Sean,” she said, “himself spent the night out with one of his boyfriends, don’t you know. Probably drunk and disorderly. That’s lads for ye.” She had that old Irish way of stressing the gender to indicate, not so subtly, that he wasn’t sleeping around. “Who’s this?”

  “Jeremy Carr.”

  “Oh, yes, the music fellow. Sure and I don’t know what to tell you, Jeremy, but I’ll let him know you rang.”

  Jeremy hung up. Sean must be at Marty’s if he didn’t spend the night at home. With some difficulty Jeremy extracted his car from the parking lot, eager not to encounter anyone else.

  Marty Rothbard lived a quarter mile from the I-81 exit ramp about three miles south of Thebes. His apartment had been something of an afterthought, and done with economy or tightfisted stupidity. It was basically a one room tent-shaped space built over a garage that the county used for storing highway lawnmowers; you could only stand up straight in the center of the room, a square of about ten feet in each direction. Beyond that the roof slanted to meet the floor, and you had to stoop, or crouch, or slide yourself on your belly. The difficult part was the toilet. It was tucked under the eaves; you had to use it with your chest pressed up against the tops of your thighs. Given that there was only a cardboard screen around the toilet, made of refrigerator packaging, the indignity was immense, and Marty didn’t entertain often.

  So Jeremy wasn’t used to seeing Sean there, stretched out on Marty’s futon. Sean was fully clothed, and had a scarf wrapped around his neck beside, and several greasy looking blankets were half kicked away. “Got your message,” said Jeremy to Marty, who looked grim and tired like a vet of some secret war. “What is all this?”

  “Oh, the saints come marching in,” said Sean from the bed. “How was church? See my folks there?—” He interrupted himself with a low, rumbling cough.

  “We ate last night over at Bozo Joe’s,” said Marty. “Sean had a milkshake and it was too thick or something, he started coughing and couldn’t stop. It was disgusting. I took him back here because he didn’t want to go home.”

  “Why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”

  “This isn’t hospital-worthy gunk I’m expectorating,” said Sean. “It’s your standard issue thoracic snot—” He demonstrated, filthily; then he grabbed for a bath towel.

  “So Marty—we’re going to take him bodily to the hospital whether he wants to go or not? I’m ready.”

  “I wanted you to come over and make sure he didn’t choke on his own fluids while I go out and grab some coffee,” Marty replied. “I wasn’t exactly expecting company so I didn’t get things in.”

  “How bad is this?” said Jeremy. He sat down on a footstool and didn’t judge correctly, and bumped his head against the ceiling. But when he turned and glared, he saw that there were smudge marks from Marty’s oily scalp as a sort of high-water mark all around the room. “Sean, are you being stupid or are you just being idiotic?”

  “Glad to know you’ve just come from church, it makes you that much more sympathetic. Just for that, I’m going to let you help me get to the crapper. Can you pull me up?”

  “I’m outa here. Three coffees?” said Marty, and split.

  “Marty’s such a good friend to you, Sean. Now please don’t tell me you’re feeling liquid at the other end, too.”

  “Feel me yourself and let me know,” said Sean. “You fucktard. This isn’t exactly fun for me, you know.”

  Jeremy got him to the toilet and then stood as far away as he could and called, “You’re okay, right?” and there was an answering blat.

  “Name that tune,” called Sean.

  Jeremy began to sing one of his songs, the one that still required a little work on the bridge. “You don’t need help?” he called hopefully.

  “The kind of help I need you can’t give.”

  “Did you tell your folks you were feeling under the weather?” said Jeremy, knowing the answer.

  “What business is it of theirs?”

  “I think it’s some business of theirs. You might need a doctor.”

  “I’m not a kid, Germy.” The toilet flushed. “Would you mind opening a window? I have some pride, you know.”

  “It’s freezing out. That’s the worst thing for you, that air.”

  “Do as I say.”

  Jeremy obeyed, but he closed the window after only a minute. “You’re going to wait until the absolute last possible minute to tell anyone? Don’t you think you should get some advice about this, Sean? They
are your family. You’ve got to prepare them.”

  “There’s no fairness in any of this, why should I try to introduce any? Don’t make me mad, I’ll cough my lungs out. You know my folks. You see them at church. Come on. Mr. and Mrs. Sanctum Sanctorum. They’re Catholic Nazis and homophobic Irish mafia and the Judgment of Santa Claus all rolled up in one. If they can keep themselves in the dark about me despite all evidence to the contrary, why should I disabuse them of it? Why should I help them out one fucking bit?”

  “Well, for one reason, you live with them.” It was a relief to try sounding abrasive. “They could be Genghis Khan and the Queen of the Night, but they’re still your kin, and even the wicked are capable of suffering.”

  “I consider it a spectator sport to watch them slip around any difficult subject. They’d rephrase the truth to make me—inert—irresponsible—a victim. They’d rather suspect my dentist of infecting me with a contaminated toothpick than accept the fact that I’m gay. Why are you making me talk this all out again?”

  “So you’re going to stay here until exactly when?”

  “You heard about the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling this week? Upholding some legalized oppression that the legislators added to the state constitution to forbid gay marriage? Who do you think was out there leading the rally?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “They would’ve been if they weren’t so cheap, I bet. Anyway, I’m sure they sent their prayers winging to support the bigots.”

  “Must be fun to have dinner at your house.”

  “You’re welcome to stay here, of course,” said Marty halfheartedly, coming in with three coffee cups steadied in a takeout tray.

  “I’m going to stay until I’m ready to go. A day, or two,” said Sean.

  “What if I stop by your house and chat with your folks,” said Jeremy. “Listen. I could just tell them you’re not feeling great and that’s all. At least it’ll be the beginning of telling them, Sean. Come on.”

  “You do that,” said Sean, “and I’ll back out of singing with you in New York.”

  As if, Jeremy thought, looking at the exhausted, yellow-skinned figure letting himself back down on the mattress, as if you’re ever going to be able to make it to Manhattan at this rate. But that was a fiction of survival, it was something Sean was aiming for, and Jeremy didn’t have the heart to contradict him. He just shook his head—trapped again by people he loved—and fiddled with the lid of the coffee, burning his fingers.