Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  “And how do garments figure into this?”

  “You wear them after you’ve made your covenants. It’s just a reminder, nothing more, nothing less. Not magic. No different than, say, a yarmulke or ear locks.”

  “So... Sebastian was a missionary, right? He made these covenants? Wore them?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Before he left the mission, left the Church. No matter how silly he thinks it all is, he won’t mock that.”

  “I could’ve called him, then,” I said, more to myself than her.

  “Yes, but... Mitch should have explained this to you.”

  “He only drew the same parallel you just did. He doesn’t let me see them much. In fact, I didn’t even know about them until we got back from our honeymoon. So when I asked him what this means with, say, Mina, he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  She stared at me for a second as if she hadn’t seen that coming, and she was trying to formulate a response. I half expected her to refuse to answer, the way Prissy and Ashworth had.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Thanks, Mitch.” She took a deep breath and then dove in. “Short answer: He married Mina for eternity and you until death. He dies, he’s with Mina. If you die without marrying him that way, too, you get to hang out in the awesomeness that is heaven with whoever you make friends with when you get there.”

  I thought about that as our meals were served. It didn’t sit well.

  At all.

  We ate in companionable silence while I worked my way through it and all its implications.

  Too.

  Oh, God.

  “So that’s it?” I finally asked, because it was the only thing I could think to say. “What if you don’t want to be with your eternal spouse eternally?”

  She shrugged. “I believe in a just and merciful God, and— Now, this is the gospel according to Giselle,” she warned, and I nodded. By this time, I knew better than to think of these people as monolithic. “I think that justice and mercy are two sides of the same coin.” I glanced at her, confused. “My theory is that, with perfect knowledge as to our hearts and minds, God gives each person exactly what they deserve, which is exactly what they’d be most happy with.

  “Which is partially to say that if you don’t want to be with your spouse eternally, I don’t think you have to be. Why would you want to be with someone who doesn’t want you? Why would God make you be?” She sat up and leaned forward. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not married to my husband for eternity, either. Just death.”

  “Um...oh. Okay?”

  “He was sealed—that’s what we call it, ‘sealed’—to his first wife, but she was just evil. She was abusive, to him and their children. She cheated on him prolifically and indiscriminately, putting his health at risk—and it’s a miracle he doesn’t have any diseases. She couldn’t have been using condoms or birth control because she got pregnant and none of the four children she had are actually his—not that he ever made that distinction. I’m shocked she didn’t abort them all, though I suspect there were one or two of those, too.” She pointed her fork at me. “Now, you can’t tell me that woman deserves anything decent in the hereafter, and Bryce sure as hell didn’t do anything to deserve being stuck with her for eternity.”

  “Four children? I thought you only had one.”

  “Our child—Bryce’s and mine—is his fifth. You know all those burn scars on his face? The ones that got you as hot and bothered as they get me?”

  I rolled my eyes, but didn’t bother to deny it.

  “His children and wife died in the fire where he got those burns.”

  God, my mind blew all to bits. I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if any one of my girls died, much less all at once, to say nothing of dying such horrible deaths. The thought left me breathless and bereft by proxy, and it took me a while to fight my way out of that emotional quicksand so as to continue the discussion I’d summoned her for.

  I cleared my throat.

  “So... Um. Why aren’t you, uh—”

  “Sealed.”

  “—sealed to your husband?”

  “We were excommunicated,” she mumbled, now paying extra attention to her steak. “We can’t go to the temple until we’ve completed our repentance process. Rebaptized. Wait a year. At least. I don’t...” She bit her lip. Gulped. “I don’t know if he’ll ever—”

  “Why were you excommunicated?”

  She dashed tears away from her face. “Um, fornication. Bryce broke his temple covenants. Deliberately.”

  “His? You hadn’t made any?”

  “No. I didn’t intend to until I met a man I could marry in the temple. That’s the goal, you see. And then—”

  “Wait, and then you just...caved?” I could understand falling in bed with a man. I couldn’t respect the sudden lack of discipline, especially compared to the iron control Mitch had displayed.

  Her head snapped up, a feral look on her face. “I was thirty-fucking-six years old,” she snarled. “All I needed to go over the edge was the right man to touch me just right, so keep your asinine judgments to yourself.”

  Don’t... I can’t... I want to. I want to, Cassandra, you have no idea, but I can’t. Not yet. Please.

  I acceded with a nod. Mitch was not so different from Giselle, then. I could’ve pressed him until he caved, the way Kenard had apparently pushed Giselle, but the outcome would have been vastly different.

  “Thing is,” she said, settling back, her temper gone as fast as it had flared, “because I hadn’t broken any temple covenants, there was no reason to excommunicate me. I would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist and told not to do that anymore, and since we’re married now, it would’ve been a moot point.”

  “That’s...backward. The man, I mean. Getting punished more than the woman. Usually, it’s the woman who’s vilified. Daughter of Eve and all that bullshit.”

  She shook her head. “We don’t believe in original sin and we’re not philosophically certain Eve sinned at all.” Really. “In practical terms, that translates to the man being the responsible party.” Her mouth twitched and she said wryly, “We’re kind of put on a pedestal, like we have no libido, much less that we’re a bunch of succubi running around looking for any and all innocent males to suck off in the middle of the night.”

  I laughed. “I get it. All madonna, no whore.”

  “But unfortunately—which I never noticed until Bryce pointed it out to me—the men are regularly chastised for being scoundrels and wastrels, even though they’re not. They work hard to provide for their families, put in hours and hours of church service, and never get any credit for it. Mother’s Day is sacred, but Father’s Day is a joke. Some men are more sensitive to it than others.”

  “And Bryce is.”

  She nodded. “So while it’s nice, as a woman, not to be thought of as the root of all evil and responsible for all the misery in the world, it can get condescending, and that imbalance has a few unintended consequences. Layers and layers of subtext and gender politics there I’m not going to get into.”

  I could imagine. “Okay, so if you all are so weak that you can’t be held responsible for your actions, why did you get excommunicated?”

  “I...kind of...asked to be. See, Bryce has posttraumatic stress.” No doubt. “He’s been in therapy for—oh, hmmm. Dunc just turned two—so, almost three years now. He has a lot of baggage with the Church that he’s trying to sort out while he sorts out his trauma. The last thing he needed was for his wife—who was an equal partner in the deed and just as culpable, because I could’ve said no and he would have respected that—to be sent along on her way while he had to go through the whole ordeal. It would have been the final betrayal for him and I didn’t want to be the fulcrum on which he broke. I wanted to support him, to acknowledge my part in what we did, to not let him carry that alone.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘kind of’ asked?”

  “They’d decided not to, but I talked to my bishop, told him why I though
t it would be better for Bryce, so he agreed to it. Reluctantly.” She pursed her lips. “I believe Bryce has responded better to his therapy and church because of it.”

  “How does he feel about that?”

  “Hates it. He feels it was all his doing, because he intended to break his covenants, wanted to break them with me.”

  Ah, enlightenment. “To break his ethereal bond with his first wife and forge a corporeal bond with you. You wouldn’t be number two.”

  “Exactly. The bad part is it also broke his bond with his children, and he adored them. He’d forgotten about that. So, in effect, he lost them twice.”

  I would lose much more than this game, Cassandra. You have no idea how much I have at stake.

  But she was still talking. “...also didn’t think about how I might have to deal with my own emotional fallout or even that I’d have any. Because of his motives, he feels he used me. Because of the way it happened, he refuses to concede that I had a choice.”

  I raised my eyebrow and waved a hand. She sighed and hit me with the most marvelous seduction story I’d ever heard. Under other circumstances, I would have gasped and squealed and giggled like a little girl, asked for more, but this was not the time.

  “So, yeah, he would’ve pushed me until he got me in bed, but it wouldn’t have happened if I really didn’t want it to.”

  “Why not? He’s twice your size.”

  “I was armed.”

  Guns. As a matter of course. Such a foreign concept to me, yet it was one of the reasons I’d first considered Ashworth as my executor: Where he went, his family’s guns followed.

  “And so the first time you slept with him, his garments...?”

  “Bryce hadn’t worn them in years. They all burned and he never replaced them.”

  “If he’d had them on that night, would you have had sex with him?”

  She said nothing for the longest while. “No,” she finally murmured slowly. “I would’ve made him take me to Vegas right then or made him wait until Monday when the courthouse opened. I knew he wasn’t wearing them, so it didn’t occur to me to play what-if.”

  “You knew? Before he took his clothes off?”

  She nodded. “You can tell. When you go to church Sunday, watch the men’s pants legs, down around the knees. You’ll be able to see the impression of the hems through the fabric. And through the shirts. It looks like an ordinary tee shirt under there, but if you pay attention, you’ll start picking it up. The first time Bryce and I officially met, Sebastian had already told me he was a member of the Church, so I was surprised when I didn’t see the ridge around his knees or the deep scoop under his dress shirt. Then he propositioned me and I knew he’d left the Church behind.”

  “That didn’t bother you?”

  Once again, she hesitated. “No.” Bullshit. “I...felt lucky to have a sexually aggressive man who’d grown up in the same culture I did and could speak my language. No backtracking or explaining, like what Mitch had to do for you. He didn’t have to be told why my sleeping with him before marriage was significant. I didn’t have to be told why his sleeping with me was even more significant. I didn’t have to worry about him not believing that I was a thirty-six-year-old virgin or having to explain why. I bet you spent weeks trying to figure out how to get Mitch in bed because you thought you could get around him.”

  That was true enough and I said so.

  “And...” she murmured, looking away from me, her face flushing. “I made the mistake of assuming that Bryce would...um...”

  “Repent.”

  She gulped, and suddenly, my heart ached with hers.

  “So,” she said abruptly after a tense silence. She cleared her throat. “You summoned me to take this bug out of your ass?”

  I chuckled, but only half-heartedly. “Yeah, but it’s still there.”

  “Well. I understand.” Yes, she did. All too well. “Here’s the thing: Mitch isn’t going to stop wearing his garments and asking him to will pretty much be a punch in the face. If I were you, I’d make an effort to get used to it or at least don’t say anything about them.” I nodded. Status quo, with information I finally understood, even if I didn’t like it. “Are you really planning on joining the Church?”

  It was the same question Sebastian had asked, in the same disapproving tone of voice, then Prissy, and I couldn’t imagine why all these people wanted to keep me out.

  “No information is sacred in your family, is it?”

  “Not much, no.”

  “I’m—” Too. “—was—thinking about it. Why?”

  “Do you believe?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She barked a laugh that had no humor in it whatsoever. “Oh, yes, it matters very much. You have an honest relationship with Mitch: You don’t believe, he knows that, he accepts you on that basis. Don’t do this because you think it’ll make him happy. It’s a lot harder to be married to a member who doesn’t believe than it is to be married to a nonmember.”

  “Your husband doesn’t believe at all, then?”

  “He doesn’t know what to believe. His father had a fucked-up idea of doctrine, drilled it into him, and he’s having to relearn everything. We—me, Knox, and Morgan, I mean. We give him a frame of reference. Answer his questions, clear things up. We might all have our issues with the Church—and it with us—but we have a solid grounding in doctrine and we believe. Because Knox and I aren’t exactly the most pure people ever, and Morgan’s constantly torn between the Church and his homosexuality, Bryce trusts us to help him sort it out.”

  Giselle was on the last few bites of the chef salad she’d requested after finishing her enormous steak. Her dessert, she’d said. I watched her eat and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out where she put it all. “You have to understand,” she continued. “Generally, the Church sees excommunication as a break that you can build on. You know, start over fresh. Clean slate. Like bankruptcy. Bryce needs that.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I do. I mean, that night, when he and I first slept together—I don’t see how it could have ended any other way. On the other hand, I want the chance to spend eternity with him and I believe this is the only way I can do it.”

  I sighed. The doctrine itself, what I knew of it, seemed to have some sort of internal logic. But the culture— The entire culture was one fat complicated mess of rules and regulations, traditions, unwritten protocols, exceptions, and paradoxes.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice steady and serious. “We are a culture of paradox. It’s hard to navigate. I choose to believe the core principles, so I’ve chosen to put up with the cultural and political bullshit I don’t like—and there’s a lot I don’t like. While I think that your going to church with Mitch is a good thing for both of you because it shows him you’re supportive of him, getting baptized if you don’t believe is taking that supportive spouse thing way too far. I think it would be a bad thing.

  “Why don’t you take a cue from Mitch, since he hasn’t tried to direct you toward this at all? I have a sneaking suspicion he’d pull rank on you and disallow it anyway. Look, you went to church on your own and you stuck with him on your own without getting laid and you married him. So... Go home, think about it. When you’re ready, force the issue, make him talk to you. I’ve given you the information you need to do that.”

  “You do understand I only married him to fuck him, right?”

  “Is that right. Well, in that case, tell me something. If you had known it was possible you’d be playing second fiddle to Mina for eternity, would you have gotten involved with him?”

  I’m not going to lie and say I would’ve gotten involved with you if I’d known all this up front. I wouldn’t have.

  “I don’t need an eternal commitment to get my itch scratched.”

  “Then Mina’s eternal dibs on Mitch shouldn’t make any difference to you, should it?”

  I hate lawyers.

  She speared me with those
cold eyes again. Were I not so secure in my place in the world, she might have scared me a little. “The garments? Deal with it. Graciously. It is incumbent upon you to accept him the way he is for however long you’re together. After all, he accepts you and you rebuilt your wealth on your back.”

  “You’re a real bitch, you know that?”

  “And that is why you called me,” she said as she patted her mouth with her napkin. “Let’s go shopping.”

  * * * * *

  The Big Finish

  April 8, 2011

  Friday morning, I sat in my temporary permanent Blackwood Securities digs at Hollander Steelworks, up to my elbows in designs for home décor and jewelry one of the foundry’s draftsmen had brought to me at Mitch’s request. Sebastian, as his artistic alter-ego Ford, had designed a good half of them.

  I was, in fact, staring at Sebastian’s—Ford’s—bold signature on the exquisite rendering of a bracelet when my phone began jangling his ringtone—“Brass in Pocket.”

  “Yo, Cass,” he said when I answered. “Hate to barge in on your honeymoon, but this guy from, uh... Let’s see, Vorcester & Minden. Yeah. Mid-sized company in Alabama. He called me today, sounds desperate for some expertise. Can you take it?”

  “Can’t stand to leave the royal brats behind?”

  “Well, that and I don’t do insurance companies. Never have.”

  Of course not. He served producers.

  “No problem. Deets?”

  “I’ll email ’em. Thanks.”

  My assistant and I had our routine down cold. She would pass out the particulars to my staff, who would do some preliminary research at one end of the company while I did some on the other end, and we’d meet in the middle with details and data analysis.

  I called the Minden half of Vorcester & Minden, introduced myself, and told him to expect me Tuesday.

  “Thank you, Ms. St. James. Thank you!”

  Huh. Such obsequiousness usually made me roll my eyes, but this was too desperate, too relieved, too...sincere.