Stillness in Bethlehem

by Jane Haddam

  Cara shoved her snow boots under the bench and wriggled her toes in her black leather pumps. “My feet feel like hell,” she said, “but I had an interview this morning, and I didn’t want to look like a hick. I’ve applied to Smith, did I tell you that? They like you to talk to their alumnae when you’re applying, and I had to spend the morning with this perfectly idiotic woman who spends all her time trying to save some kind of owl from development. I mean, I’m all for environmentalism, for God’s sake, but you ought to have something else on your mind at least some of the time. I’d have gone home to change except that I didn’t have time. I was supposed to have time, but I got caught up. Because of Tisha Verek and closing down the Celebration, you know.”

  “Mmm,” Candy said, looking away. Candy knew what Cara thought—which was that Candy didn’t understand half the things that Cara said—but it wasn’t true, not exactly. Candy George was not stupid, although most people thought she was. It was just that she felt as if she were holding a large heavy boulder on her shoulders and her head, and the effort took so much energy there wasn’t enough left to do anything else. The boulder was always particularly heavy when she was around Cara Hutchinson—almost as heavy as it was when she was around Reggie himself. It would have been even worse around her father or her stepfather, but they were both dead.

  The basement door opened again and in came Mrs. Johnson, who was playing the innkeeper’s wife. She gave a suspicious middle-aged look at both of them and began to unwrap herself from her shawl.

  “Are you two the only ones here yet?” she demanded. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into people these days. It used to be an honor and a privilege to have a part in the Celebration.”

  “We don’t know that nobody else is here yet,” Cara Hutchinson said. “We haven’t looked into the auditorium.”

  “We don’t have to look into the auditorium,” Candy said. “There aren’t any other coats here.”

  Cara whipped around, contemptuous. “What does it matter if there aren’t any coats here? They could have brought them with them into the auditorium and left them on the seats. They could be wearing them. It’s cold in here.”

  “Oh,” Candy said, flushing. “Yeah. Well.”

  “Don’t say ‘yeah,’ ” Mrs. Johnson said automatically. “It makes you sound cheap.”

  Cara Hutchinson coughed. “Well,” she said with false brightness. “I’ve just been talking to Candy here about Tisha Verek. Have you heard about Tisha Verek, Mrs. Johnson?”

  “Everybody in town’s heard about Tisha Verek,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Benjy Warren called Franklin Morrison and Franklin called Peter Callisher and everybody at the newspaper overheard it. Lord, but isn’t this just like that piece of baggage. Doesn’t even have the decency to hide behind her man. Just goes right out and does it on her own, and sits back and waits for the rest of us to applaud.”

  “Does what?” Candy asked, confused.

  “It’s about Tisha Verek,” Cara said slowly, as if she were talking to a mental defective. “You know Mrs. Verek? Who’s married to that artist who lives out at the end of the Delaford Road?”

  “I know Mrs. Verek,” Candy said stiffly.

  “Well, Mrs. Verek is going to court to sue the town about the Celebration,” Cara said, slowing her voice down, making any word of more than a single syllable take long seconds to get out. “That’s because there’s this law, called the Bill of Rights—”

  “The Bill of Rights isn’t a law,” Candy said sharply. “It’s part of the Constitution. I know what the Constitution is, Cara.”

  “Oh. Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t think that was the kind of thing you were interested in.”

  “Who cares what she’s interested in?” Mrs. Johnson demanded. “I’ll tell her what it’s all about and I’ll do it in less time, too. What you’re going on about, Cara, is beyond me. It’s all that freedom-of-religion business, like the reason we can’t pray anymore in school. Tisha Verek is going to the federal court and saying that our Celebration keeps her from having freedom of religion, and that the court ought to make us stop.”

  “Going?” Candy shot a quick look at the clock, bewildered.

  “She’s supposed to leave at nine-thirty,” Cara put in. “At least, that’s what she seems to have told everybody. Camber Hartnell’s going with her. They’re going to try to get an injunction to shut the Celebration down. Maybe it won’t matter that we’ve done all this rehearsing. Maybe we’ll just have to fold our tents and go home.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Peter Callisher was absolutely positive that there wouldn’t be anything like that, this year at least. He told Betty Heath that Tisha Verek had waited far too long, and now it would be at least a year before she could get the Celebration shut down. If she can get it shut down at all.”

  Cara Hutchinson shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, “but if you ask me, it all depends on the kind of judge they get down there in Montpelier, and with all the flatlanders we’ve got here now and that woman in the governor’s mansion, you can’t tell how things are going to turn out. I’m going to be ready no matter what. I think it’s the only sensible thing.”

  “I think getting your name in the paper has gone to your head,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Nobody’s going to shut down the Celebration. If you’re using this as a way to excuse not knowing your lines—”

  “I always know my lines,” Cara said.

  “Well,” Mrs. Johnson conceded, “you probably do. But I say we get to work and keep working until we hear we shouldn’t, because if we don’t work, it will surely turn out we should have. Let’s go in to the auditorium and wait. Maybe it’ll be warmer in there. Candy?”

  Candy went “mmm,” and then, realizing that both Cara and Mrs. Johnson were looking at her, forced a smile. The boulder felt bigger now, enormous, and Candy was doing as much as she could just to remember how to breathe. Cara and Mrs. Johnson were staring at her as if she were the stupidest person in the world—which, in Candy’s opinion, they had every right to do. Candy knew she was stupid in much the same way she knew she was ugly. She could look in the mirror and tell.

  Candy backed up a little and made herself take a deep breath. “Excuse me,” she said. “I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Are you feeling ill?” Mrs. Johnson asked her.

  “There’s that nasty flu going around,” Cara said. “It could put you in bed for a week.”

  “I just have to go to the bathroom,” Candy said again. Then she turned her back on them and began to move faster, chugging down the hall, heading for the polished wooden door with “Ladies” printed on it. Behind her, Cara and Mrs. Johnson were muttering to each other. For one awful moment, Cara’s voice floated into the dead silence and steam-heated calm.

  “God only knows what the committee was thinking of when they picked her,” Cara said. “She can’t think her way out of a paper bag.”

  “Shhh,” Mrs. Johnson said, sounding frantic.

  Candy got through the ladies’ room door, across the carpeted expanse in front of the vanities, down the tile corridor in the back room and into a stall. Then she shut the stall door and locked it and laid her forehead against the cold comfort of the gray metal partition wall. She didn’t care what Cara said about her mind. Everybody said that kind of thing about her and had been saying it for years. She didn’t care what Mrs. Johnson thought ought to be kept a secret, either. She knew enough about secrets to start her own college of witchcraft. What she did care about was—

  All of a sudden, it felt very quiet in the ladies’ room, quiet and ominous, the way the house got just before Reggie really took off or just before her stepfather used to come into her room. That was another house, of course, but it all ran together, it was all one and the same place except for here. Here was different. Here was air that was full of oxygen and quiet that was comforting instead of dangerous and laughter that never got crazy and out of control, and here would be that way as long as she, Candy Geor
ge, went on being somebody else in a long robe with an angel to come and visit her. That was the key. That was the small wedge of light in this sea of black ink. When the Celebration was over, she would go back to being what she really was, and that was… that was—

  Suddenly, Candy George got a very clear picture of a woman she had seen only two or three times in her life. She was Tisha Verek, and in Candy’s vision, she was standing next to a small German car at the side of a road, looking like a deer that had frozen at the sound of an approaching hunter.

  7

  It was ten minutes after nine when Gemma Bury got her third and last call of the morning about Tisha Verek’s lawsuit, and it was nine-twelve when she decided that the situation was likely to drive her straight into a nuthouse before it was resolved. Gemma Bury liked putting it that way to herself—straight into a nuthouse—almost as much as she had once liked smoking cigarettes in the boiler room at her very expensive girls’ boarding school in Virginia. There was something about indulging in the forbidden that produced a kick nothing else could. Gemma was thirty-eight years old, and she had spent much of her life in search of that kick. At school, it had been easy to find. Gemma’s parents had been fond of the kinds of schools whose rule books were thicker than their curricula. At college, it had been harder. Gemma had gone to Sarah Lawrence right in the middle of the sexual revolution. There hadn’t seemed to be anything that was really out of bounds. Then she’d decided to enter the seminary. At the time, she had made a point of telling everyone who asked that she had finally gotten in contact with the Force of the Universe. Since she was entering a self-consciously modern, studiously New Age conduit for professional practitioners of Anglican alternative, this was even taken as admirable spirituality. Gemma didn’t know if she was spiritual or not. She liked being an Episcopalian because there was so little of it—at least in her branch—that would try to hold her back from experiencing anything in the world at all. She also liked it because it had developed a moral code so involved, so convoluted and so entangling, it was as impossible to escape as the Iron Mask. Of course, she didn’t put it that way to herself. To herself, she said she was an Episcopalian because it was the one truly progressive branch of Christianity, the one that recognized the legitimate aspirations of women, the one that had true compassion for homosexuals, the one that had dedicated itself to the full range of psychic actualization and human growth. She also told herself that there must be something wrong with her, something close to pathological, because in the secret recesses of her mind she used words like “nuthouse.”

  Hanging up on old Mrs. Garrison, who had talked for two straight minutes about the tragedy that would ensue if the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was shut down, Gemma decided it was about time to go upstairs and talk to Kelley Grey. Kelley Grey was Gemma Bury’s assistant, and the one really good idea Gemma had had since coming to Bethlehem, Vermont. Whether coming to Bethlehem, Vermont, had been a good idea itself, Gemma wasn’t sure. It certainly wasn’t what she’d expected it to be. What she’d expected it to be was a re-creation of her seminary, populated by upper-middle-class escapees from Boston and New York and more progressive than a meeting of the American Sociological Society. She’d got some of that, but she’d also got a surprising amount of something else—meaning older people with very reactionary ideas. The amount of sexism, racism and homophobia running rampant in the Vermont hills was truly astounding. It was a blessing most of these people didn’t object to having a woman priest. Gemma had no trouble imagining what they might have objected to, if given half a chance. That was why she didn’t give them half a chance. She had tried preaching about the Goddess once, about how we had to give God Her female face, and the fuss had lasted for weeks. Now she only preached about the Goddess to the Women’s Awareness Project, where she could be sure of her audience.

  The phone Gemma had answered to take Mrs. Garrison’s call was in the office off the main vestibule of the church. When Gemma hung up, she went out the office door, across the vestibule and into the church itself. It was a fine old church, over 200 years old, built of stone and mortar. The ceilings were high and the leaded stained-glass windows were full of agony. It was an ecological nightmare, of course. It was impossible to heat and sucked up fossil fuels like a fat baby sucks up formula. It was one of Gemma’s secret vices that she really didn’t care. She liked this church, its gracefulness, its grandness, its majesty. She swept through it sometimes feeling like Queen Elizabeth the First.

  Now she just jogged through, not bothering to imagine queens, and went down the steps to the door to the tunnel that went under the lawn to the rectory. The rectory was only 100 years old, but it was just as magnificent a building as the church was. The ceilings were fourteen feet high. The staircase at the front entrance was a curving sweep worthy of hoop skirts and Scarlett O’Hara. The cubed patterns that surrounded the interior doors had been cut from three-inch pieces of teakwood. It was a house built at a time when Episcopal priests were assumed to be Episcopal gentlemen, with all that that entailed in a nineteenth-century world. Gemma would never have believed it, but she looked perfectly natural in this place. Her genetics were in favor of it. She was, after all, the descendant of the very same aristocratic WASPs who had wanted their rectories to look like this one. Her temperament was in favor of it, too. No one who had known Gemma Bury for ten minutes would have been the least surprised that she imagined herself as Queen Elizabeth the First. They would have suspected her of imagining herself as Catherine the Great. Given the time and place of her birth, she had turned out to be an Episcopal priest—but she had been born to be an empress.

  She made her way to the rectory’s second floor, down a short corridor and then through a door to a longer and narrower one. In the old days, these had been the servants’ quarters. Gemma now used the rooms as offices for the church groups she especially favored. The Women’s Awareness Project had an office up here. So did the Social Justice Committee. So did the Ecumenical Society. Gemma had considered turning one of the rooms over to a Sikh who had been expelled from El Salvador, but the Sikh had found other Sikhs and Gemma was never able to figure out what he had been doing in El Salvador anyway.

  Gemma stopped at the third door on the right, listened for a moment to the sound of an IBM electronic typewriter rattling away and knocked. Knowing Kelley, she didn’t wait for her knock to be answered. She just opened the door and stuck in her head. Kelley was sitting with her back to the door, hunched over the typewriter, copying something out of a notebook she had to scrunch over to read. Kelley was working on her dissertation for a doctorate in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and she was always scrunching over something trying to read.

  Gemma flicked a glance at Kelley’s one sentimental concession to the season—a glass snow ball with a Vermont-like town scene in it—and cleared her throat. Kelley sat up straight and took her glasses off, but didn’t turn around. Gemma went over to the side of the desk instead and sat down on the metal folding chair that had been left there, as if Kelley were trying to signal that guests were welcome, but not very. Ordinarily, Gemma would not have put up with this sort of behavior. It was inappropriate, and Gemma hated all things inappropriate. Kelley, however, was Kelley. She was short and squat and very, very neurotic.

  Gemma stretched out her legs, looked up at the ceiling and said, “Well. I’ve interrupted you. You know I had to.”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gemma said. “I’ve been taking phone calls all morning. From all the old ladies. I’m afraid I was beginning to lose it.”

  “About Tisha Verek?” Kelley was finally interested. Kelley was always interested in Tisha Verek. Gemma didn’t know why.

  “The thing is,” Gemma said, “on the subject of the lawsuit, we can hardly blame her, can we? Tisha, I mean. You know, I’ve thought about bringing a lawsuit like that myself.”

  “It would have caused a terrible mess,” Kelley said wryly. “The old ladies would probably have given up wri
ting to the bishop and gone down and picketed instead. Or they would have picketed you.”

  “I know. I still think I should have done it. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to show the community what real Christianity is all about. It would have been a splendid object lesson in true tolerance.”

  “It would have been professional suicide.” Kelley laughed. She had been threading a pencil through the fingers of her left hand, a nervous habit she fell back on at the start of every conversation. Now she put the pencil down and stretched. “Just be glad Tisha came along and decided to do it herself. I don’t care how you feel about tolerance or Christianity or any of the rest of it. This is a small town. I grew up in a town like this.”

  “And you hated it,” Gemma said solemnly. “It stifled you.”

  “Not really.” Kelley shrugged. “I felt a lot more stifled at Swarthmore, if you want to know the truth. Stifling isn’t my point. My point is that towns like this tend to get involved in very us and them-oriented wrangles. It’s not true they care so much about your not having been around for twenty years. What they really care about is whose side you’re on.”

  “I’m sure I’m on everybody’s side,” Gemma said disapprovingly. “We’re all on the same side, after all. We’d realize that if we only took the time to determine our true interests.”

  “Right,” Kelley said. “You tell that to the Bethlehem school board when it wants to put in a language lab and it doesn’t have the money because the Celebration’s been shut down.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the Bethlehem school board,” Gemma said. “I want to talk about Tisha. She’s supposed to be leaving for Montpelier in just about fifteen minutes, and once she does, we’re going to have to have a policy. In advance. If we don’t have a policy, the old ladies are going to end up running right over us.”

  “The old ladies are going to run right over us anyway,” Kelley said. “They always do.”