by Robert Stone
“Well, the thing is,” McCallum said, “I haven’t got their consent quite yet.”
“Fuck their consent.”
“I don’t know if that’s the attitude. Look,” he said before Stack could answer, “let me show you.”
When he came back he had a rectangular box that looked as though it might be made of slate. It was slate-colored, very dark gray and marked with a dark green cross like the ones that illuminated medieval Celtic manuscripts.
“You didn’t tell us, Mr. Stack. We had to hope it was satisfactory.”
“You mean it’s done?”
“That was how we interpreted your instructions. We had to take the risk it would be all right.”
McCallum held the box toward him in a way that presented him with the option of taking it or not.
Stack put his hands out stiffly and took hold of it. It was cool and smooth, considerably bigger and heavier than he had expected. McCallum rose and quickly took it from him and laid it in front of a gray curtain behind his desk.
“I very much hope it’s all right. Mrs. McCallum and I . . .”
“It’ll be fine,” Stack said. He had resolved to make them put Maud with Barbara.
“You look angry.”
“I’m not angry at you.”
He was surprised to hear mention of Mrs. McCallum because he had taken James McCallum for gay. In fact, the Mrs. McCallum referred to was McCallum’s mother.
“So I should take it now,” Stack said. “Let’s take it over.”
“Well, they haven’t made the call. I talked to them and I thought I had arranged it but they haven’t made the call.”
“That’s OK,” Stack said. “We’ll just take it there.”
“What if they don’t accept it?”
“Don’t accept it? What do you mean?”
“Well,” McCallum said in some confusion. “I was talking to a friend over there. I thought it would be all right. Now it’s unclear.”
“I’ll go clear it up.”
“I don’t know,” McCallum said.
“Give me the . . . thing there. What do you call it?”
“Casket. It’s a casket.”
Stack went and got it.
“I thought it was ‘cremains’ or some shit.”
“Mr. Stack, please.”
“Casket. I’m going to take it over there to the church.”
McCallum rose from his chair and stared at Eddie Stack.
“I’d better go too.”
“Why?” Stack demanded, gripping the box. “What do you mean, you better go too?”
“Believe me, Mr. Stack. I should go. There are laws. If for some reason they don’t take it—I mean, I really thought they would—there are laws about transporting remains in New York State. You have to have a license.”
Stack and McCallum drove over to Holy Redeemer in McCallum and Jenkins’s Lincoln Town Car.
“I was thinking,” McCallum said as they drove. “You seem angry. So I’m thinking of the laws.”
“I appreciate it,” Stack said. “Does this cost me more?”
Maud’s remains were strapped into the rear seat.
“Are you serious? Of course not.”
On the way, McCallum kept trying to call his friend or whoever it was at Holy Redeemer who had encouraged his optimism, but he failed to make contact. When they got to the cathedral the undertaker parked in the space reserved for funerals.
“Nothing today,” he told Stack. “Except us.
“We’ll go to the rectory,” McCallum said. Stack, carrying the casket, kept falling behind, out of breath. Then McCallum changed his mind. “No, we won’t. We’ll go to the crypt—we’ll ring for the sexton.” So they reversed course and headed for the church itself.
Holy Redeemer had been built in the mid-1970s. It was a long, vaulted building with two huge winged structures on either side, like the flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. Both of the buttresses were larger than the vaulted construction in the center. They climbed three low, expansive steps and found every door of the main building’s entrance locked. McCallum went over to a small brass disk beside one door, a doorbell of sorts. It looked like a very old device, something from another era. Stack thought it might have come from an older church and been rigged up for this one. Above it was a plaque that read “Ring Bell for Sexton.” McCallum pressed it. No sound was audible where they stood. Stack heard no result. He set the casket down and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
“So warm today,” McCallum said to Stack. “Don’t worry,” he added. “This’ll work.” He seemed to have grown optimistic.
“Good,” said Stack.
Somewhat to Stack’s surprise, after a few minutes the door with the ring button beside it opened and a man in a black cassock came out and looked at them in a not particularly welcoming manner. He was wearing a civilian collar with a red tie under his cassock and seemed to be some kind of layperson, presumably a sexton. Stack recalled hearing or encountering the term “sexton,” but its meaning was unclear to him.
The man’s gaze immediately fell on the casket with Maud’s ashes in it. Stack found his stare somewhat offensive. He seemed to know McCallum and to not much care for him.
“What are you two doing here with that, McCallum?”
“This is Detective Stack,” McCallum said. “Detective, this is Arthur Porgest, the assistant sexton here.”
A detective was a good thing to be in Arthur Porgest’s world. He shook Stack’s hand.
“Mr. Stack unfortunately suffered the loss of his daughter. He wanted to place her remains alongside her mother’s. I’m sure it would be all right.”
“You’ll have to ask the monsignor.”
“No, no,” McCallum said. “We can unlock the crypt and put her up there.”
“I can’t just do that,” said the sexton.
“Sure you can,” Stack said. “Just do it.”
Porgest stalked off, leaving them on the steps, and came back with a pale, slight, bald priest with a purple band framing his Roman collar. The priest had a pamphlet in his hand. He raised it to his forehead to shield his eyes from the bright winter sunlight, the better to see them more clearly.
“Hello, Mr. McCallum,” he said. “Let me guess. Would this be Mr. Stack?”
“I’m Eddie Stack,” Stack said. “I’ve brought my daughter here. I mean, I’ve brought her body here.”
McCallum and the priest looked down at the white steps of the church, away from the casket.
“We’ve heard about your need from Mr. McCallum. I’m Father Washington.” He put his hand out but Stack did not take it. “I’m afraid this is still under discussion.”
“What do you mean, ‘this’? Letting my daughter be with her mother? I want to put her here now.”
“This is embarrassing,” the priest said.
“Is it?” Stack asked him.
The priest, smaller by several inches than McCallum or Stack, kept the pamphlet at his forehead and looked at them with what seemed great intensity. Because of his baldness and the smoothness of his head, the reflected glow he cast was impressive.
“For one thing, I’m afraid I can’t ask you into the rectory at the moment. Or . . .” He gestured beyond the tall doors of the church. “We may not look busy today, but we are. His Eminence hasn’t made a decision on this.”
“Couldn’t we,” McCallum asked, “just place Miss Stack’s remains now? And perhaps talk later.”
“Mr. McCallum,” the priest said, “we are not a convenience-store operation. You don’t drop in on us. You,” he told McCallum, “of all people, should know that. And,” he told Stack, “you should too, sir.”
“Mr. Stack is a police officer,” McCallum told the priest.
“Is that right?” Father Washington asked. “Very fine. Thank you for your service. Actually, I think I read that somewhere.”
“How about opening up and receiving the kid’s ashes?”
“Yeah, well,” Father Washingt
on said in a strange tone, different from the brisk one he had been employing. “Now you want us.”
“Yeah,” Stack said. “Now I want yez.”
“Not so easy,” said the priest, with the hint of a smile.
“I think she wants her mother. I think her mother wants her there.”
“I’m sorry,” Father Washington said softly. “I haven’t the authority.”
“She made a mistake,” Stack said. “I guess you heard about that. But she wants to be with her mother. Her mother would want that.”
The priest looked at each of them in turn with renewed energy. “Look here, guys. Let’s put Maud away for the weekend and we’ll all discuss it further. His Eminence—”
“Put who away?” Stack asked him, biting his lip. “Who we putting away?”
McCallum put a hand to Stack’s arm.
“Why, the young lady,” Father Washington said. “I mean . . . Miss Stack’s remains.” He took a half step back toward the door.
“Let’s put them with her mother, Father,” Stack said.
“Look, McCallum,” said the priest. “When you get back to the funeral home you can explain this to him.”
“You explain it,” Stack said to the priest. “You explain it to me.”
Father Washington turned away and disappeared through the church door that was unlocked. Porgest, the sexton, had been standing just inside.
As they drove back—Maud strapped in the back seat again—McCallum started to explain.
“It’s a very conservative diocese, Mr. Stack. Other places would be more flexible. They’d be—I hope they’d be more understanding.”
“That’s OK,” Stack said. “Not your fault.”
They placed Maud’s ashes in a curtained room behind the funeral home’s office.
“You weren’t drinking today, were you, Mr. Stack?”
“Not for the last two days. I’m still buzzing, though. Still intoxicated.”
“I’m sure they’ll see their way clear. They’re a very stuffy bunch here. And Washington, he’s a difficult man.”
“Have you been drinking, Mr. McCallum?”
McCallum smiled and wiped his brow again.
“Not for eleven years,” he said.
33
JO NEVER HEARD FROM Edward Stack about whatever arrangement he had made for Maud’s interment with her mother. When she checked with Lieutenant Salmone, she learned that Maud’s remains had been sent to New York. However, Salmone told her, the church in Nassau County was making difficulties. And there was no further word on the car or the driver.
After thinking about it Jo decided to call Dean Spofford’s wife, Mary Pick, at her New York auction house. Mary said she would stop in on the way home.
From her nearly sidewalk-level corner window Jo saw Mary Pick’s hired car swing around the square and stop in front of the one-way sign at the end of Jo’s block. She watched the rain spot the tops of Mary’s shapely Cole-Haan shoes as the dean’s lady came briskly to the counseling center’s door.
Jo and Mary had each soldiered through the unraveling ranks of the Catholic religion on various of its forced marches through the abysmal sleep of reason. They had both borne the guidon Credo quia absurdum. Mary, bred in the bone, had proved the stauncher trooper, with a commando’s grip on absurdum. Jo had taken a deep breath and bailed, and felt just fine on her own two feet. Nevertheless they had become acquainted through Jo’s contacts with members of the Newman Club, which had once included Maud Stack. What they had been compelled to know, believe and not believe, served to make them close friends at the college. Even to the point that Jo had accompanied Mary on a few of her dawn patrols to St. Blaise’s, strictly as an observer. She could risk being seen in that company. Jo also knew things many did not about her friend.
Mary Pick’s first husband had been blown in half, and her son almost completely blinded, by an IRA bomb placed under an ice cream vendor’s truck in Belfast on a May Day afternoon. Thereafter it was never pointed out in her hearing that Captain Pick had been present as a British official in Ireland attendant on government service. As it happened, Picks had been Catholics since the Conqueror, and had chosen to surrender their estates and preferments at the Reformation to remain so for the next four hundred years. Mary Pick had taken her cranky blinded eleven-year-old boy for an endless train ride down France to Lourdes, in the course of which she had been subjected to many tearful questions. Lourdes had not provided the hoped-for intercession, so there was the desolate ride back. Now Mary Pick was at the college, married to the agnostic, rather saturnine John Spofford. Her son, tall and possessed of his father’s military bearing, was now a Labour member of Parliament distinguished by the white-painted, leather-handled shepherd’s crook he used as a guide stick, a small joke of his own. He was married to a famous London journalist not warmly loved by Mary Pick.
Jo told Mary about the contretemps with the church on Long Island.
“We should profane the service of the dead,” Mary Pick recited.
Jo, startled a moment, understood that she was quoting Hamlet.
“Surely they don’t keep that kind of score, Mary.”
“The priests have become very arrogant. Again.”
“Their cause seems to be prospering in spite of every revelation,” she told Mary. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Their cause? I don’t know what cause they serve, some of these men.”
Jo got up from the desk and turned on the room’s overhead fluorescent lights. One of them nursed an irritating hum. She looked out at the puddles in the street through the wire mesh that encased the windows. The mesh dated from the days when the old building was a city school to be protected from errant fly balls.
“I’m concerned for the father,” Jo said, keeping an eye on the rain. “He’s elderly and now he’s alone. A widower. Retired policeman. No other kids. A bitter, bitter man. Drinks. He’s lost to the living world soon.”
“Did he know she’d had an abortion?”
“She never did have one. That’s what she told me, and I certainly believed her.”
“Funny,” said Mary.
“You could kind of tell it in the piece she wrote. That it was by someone outside the process.”
“How strange,” Mary said. “I thought that as well.” She smiled faintly. “I thought, What a vain creature. How little she knows.”
“I understand the bishop down on Long Island doesn’t want to put Maud’s ashes in the crypt—in the niche, whatever—with her mother. It would just be a favor, a neat thing to do. But he wants her father to commission a formal Mass of interment. In other words, come crawling and they’ll take her home.”
They sat on the table at opposite ends under the ugly whining light.
“Oh, the bishop’s an old skunk, isn’t he?” Mary said. “Wants her father to remember his daughter as a pagan and a sinner and a disgrace to her mother. With whom she will never be reunited. But he can’t pretend to cut a Christian soul off from her salvation. Over a piece written by an adolescent in a college newspaper.”
“He’s probably incapable of thinking it through that far, Mary. Who knows what he believes? Who knows who he is? What kind of people become bishops anymore?”
Jo got up and switched off the ceiling light, to kill its glare and turn off its noise.
“Quite all right,” Mary said, “some of them.”
“Really? If you say so. But you’re a very tolerant person.”
“Oh, dear,” said Mary Pick. “I’ve never been told that before.”
Jo sat and watched her elegant friend.
“I want to ask you something. I have to ask it. But I’m afraid you won’t be my friend anymore after I do.”
“Oh, my,” Mary said. “Let’s see.”
“How can you align yourself—a person like you—how can you ally yourself with such terrorizing by such people?”
“I can’t, because I don’t. I am not an activist or an agitator. I can only tell
you why I couldn’t have had an abortion. Why I think people shouldn’t do it. But you’ll know all about that.”
“Yes.”
“If anyone asks me,” Mary said, “I’ll say don’t do it. There are people who don’t believe human life starts at conception. I can’t prove them wrong. We are taught that the universe is beautiful. We believe it is good. We believe its phenomena reflect a perfection beyond our understanding but that we can partly experience. Sort of. Man—I should say humankind, shouldn’t I?—is also sacred. Reflecting that being we know as God. Matter, stuff, quickened to human life, is therefore sacred. At the moment, we are taught this quickening happens on conception.”
“At the moment.”
“We don’t argue, do we, because this is dogma, isn’t it?” Mary said. “That is the inspired teaching at the present time. Faith. A being sacred in that way is not to be destroyed at will. Cannot be judged worthy of destruction for individual or general human advantage. That’s the Church’s teaching and that’s the faith one practices.”
“And everyone else has to practice it too?”
“I hold sacred what is declared sacred. The law of the state cannot justify abortion. It isn’t the law of the state that makes human life sacred. It can’t determine what is mortal sin or blasphemy. It can’t punish spiritual crimes. It can’t presume to speak for God.”
“I never thought you felt any other way, Mary.”
Mary looked at her watch. “Got to make dinner for Deano. Ask me if he hates being called Deano. Plucked it from an inspired moment.”
“Wish I’d been there.”
“Right,” said Mary Pick. “You’re never there. No one’s ever there when I’m inspired.”
Jo walked to the door and they looked through the glass at the rain. Mary borrowed an umbrella from Jo’s enormous stash of forgotten ones.
“Not to worry, Josephine,” Mary Pick said, her hand on the knob. “We’ll get things put right for Maud’s father. The church . . . thing.”
“Hey, Mary? Did you think Maud’s piece was good? Religion aside, sort of?”
“Religion aside? A writer lost to us there. I’m going to pray for her. I like to pray that all will be well in spite of things. You know, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ In spite of it all. You should try it, really. Why not?”
