A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  “No one, I should think.” But she wondered: was his fear connected with this sad and ancient history?

  “All I know”—he made a convulsive sound loud enough so that the driver turned around briefly—“is that some people hold on to hate. I need to know that you don’t hate me.”

  “Why on earth would I hate you, Felix. Of course I don’t.”

  “Are we friends?”

  “Yes, we are friends.”

  They were silent then, a quiet silence. She looked out the window as they passed Lincoln Center and then turned on to Amsterdam. Restaurants. A gas station. A funeral parlor. Barney Green-grass, the Sturgeon King. Someday she’d like to stop in and see what was sold there besides sturgeon. Antique stores. Churches. Buildings with boarded-up windows. Clean new housing developments. Bodegas. Broken windows. Indeed, a little of everything.

  Potholes. “Don’t they ever fix these streets?” she asked in exasperation.

  “New York isn’t in the best fiscal shape.”

  Finally they were nearing the Cathedral. “If I bring you in by the entrance across from St. Luke’s Hospital we won’t have steps to climb, and I can give you a quickie glimpse of the Stone Yard.” As the taxi turned, he said, “That’s St. Luke’s, there on our left. Suzy’s office is across on Amsterdam. Here we are.” As she climbed out of the cab she saw a large woman in a grey uniform purposefully pushing a shopping cart. The woman waved at Felix, with a rather sour smile, and headed toward Broadway. Felix waved back. “That’s Mrs. Gomez. I have an irrational dislike of her. She looks like the Beast of Belsen, but she’s one of the best cooks in the city.”

  “Topaze’s and Fatima’s mother …” Katherine murmured.

  “The same, though it’s difficult to imagine her doing anything as intimate as giving birth. We go in here. I’ve got the keys.” After he had clanged the gate shut behind them, he put his hand on her elbow to help her along the rough flagstones of the path, then turned right across what seemed to be a playing field to a large, open shed. Between the shed and the Cathedral, stacked on the grass, were piles of stone, each one carefully marked by letter and number. As they neared the shed, she could hear the sound of machinery on wet stone. “I can imagine Mrs. Gomez being the matron of a concentration camp. I’m sure she hits Fatty for being clumsy, and she lets Topaze roam the streets and do anything he wants. And she cooks like an angel. No matter what, we’ll have a superb meal tonight.”

  They approached the pile of stones and he nodded toward them. “These will finish the north transept. Most of the work is done by hand, just as it was in the Middle Ages. When Dean Morton started all this, stonecutting was a lost art in this country. We have only a few modern machines, a big gantry crane, and two stone saws, which work like gigantic dentist’s drills, with water constantly flowing.” He held her arm more firmly as the terrain roughened, and led her into the shed, where he was immediately greeted by an assorted group of young men and women, some at wooden worktables, chipping away at the stone with great wooden mallets and chisels, others working the machines. The only thing they had in common was an expression of love in their faces for the work they were doing.

  Felix waved at them, and told them to get on with what they were doing. He led her across the ground again, and they entered the Cathedral. As they neared the ambulatory, she saw someone slip out of the shadows and skitter away into the dimness.

  “Fatty Gomez,” Felix said in annoyance. “When she’s not with Tory, she’s afraid of her own shadow. Mrs. Gomez makes the kids wait for her to go home on the subway, and once summer school is over for the day, they don’t have any place to go.”

  One hand lightly on her elbow to guide her, he walked her up the nave. She glanced toward the high altar, and saw Bishop Undercroft kneeling at one side of a coffin draped with a great pall. A shaft of light touched his fair hair. His body was erect and although she could not see his face there was a feeling of peace about him, and an air of authority; he was very much a bishop. He did not move or sway as he knelt.

  At the other side of the coffin was a much younger man, looking like a refugee from the sixties, with long hair and blue jeans, and an enormous cross dangling on his chest. He shifted position and swatted at what appeared to be an imaginary fly and scratched at the back of his neck. There was none of the repose which emanated from the bishop.

  As they climbed the steps to the ambulatory and the altar was lost to view, Felix reached for his keys to open the chapel. He looked up and sniffed, then looked toward the long-haired priest. Katherine smelled a ropy, rather unpleasant odor.

  “Pot,” Felix said.

  “In the Cathedral?”

  Felix wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Pot in cathedrals is nothing new, unfortunately. Whenever there’s a big concert here, people tend to think they’re back in Woodstock in the sixties, particularly if it’s something to do with ecology or saving the whales. The Davidson kids, I’m glad to say, take a dim view of priests having to get stoned in order to grieve.”

  Katherine glanced again at the altar. “Maybe I’m being European, but it doesn’t seem very appropriate for a vigil.”

  “It isn’t. And it would have made Merv furious. When there’s a huge concert of non-churchgoing people it’s a little understandable, though it’s strictly forbidden, and we monitor it as much as possible. Don’t judge us by this; it truly doesn’t happen that often. Did you ever smoke?”

  “No.”

  “I did, for a while. But I didn’t like the people around me. Bless Allie. He’s doing his grieving the appropriate way. Maybe it will have some influence on the others.”

  She walked over to the piano and opened the keyboard.

  “Sorry,” Felix said. “I’ll try to see that nothing else eats into your practice time. I’ll leave you. Canon Dorsey and I are due to take over the vigil in a few minutes.”

  She ran a few scales. The superb instrument was not far from needing a tuning. She would mention it to Felix. Then, in deference to Bishop Juxon, she played through her program. She looked up, briefly, and saw that Fatima and Topaze were sitting in one of the carved pews. She had not noticed them come in. Ignoring them, she turned to some phrases which she felt needed honing, then played over, and then over again, and then over again, a Scarlatti toccata, listening to hear if the rapidly repeated notes would remain clear or blur in these acoustics.

  Clumsily bumping into the pews, so that Katherine’s attention was momentarily distracted, Fatima left the chapel. Topaze, hardly seeming to notice, sat quietly, and it was only then that she noticed Emily sitting beside him. The child’s face was somber, severe. Perhaps it was her accident which caused her to look far older than her years, but once again Katherine recognized herself in that young, carefully expressionless face. Justin had thawed her so that she was able to drop her mask of self-protection and reveal her vulnerability, and likely Emily would thaw, too. Thawing hurts, and Katherine ached for the child.

  5

  She turned from Emily to the piano, and her memory shifted gears (was it because Justin had taught her the toccata?) to her return to Paris to study with Justin when she was perhaps less than half a dozen years older than Emily now—enough to change her from near-adolescence to near-womanhood.

  After the breakup with Pete, her father and stepmother had decided, with blind oblivion to her youth and the state of the world, to send her to Paris to study with her beloved Monsieur Vigneras, who had been her piano teacher during her time in boarding school in Switzerland. Concerned only with healing her unhappiness, and with their own careers, it never seemed to have occurred to them that they were sending her into danger, nor that she was extraordinarily young for her seventeen years. Through friends a small studio apartment was found for her, and a passable piano, and she started weekly lessons with Justin, knitting up her raveled spirit with music. She lived an almost entirely solitary life. The young doctor friend they had expected to look out for her had gone with his wife to Zurich, to a p
ost in the big university hospital there. It did not occur to her any more than to Tom and Manya that she should have been finishing school. She lived from one lesson to the next, hardly aware that she was lonely. In the early winter, walking home in the rain from her lesson, she caught cold, and in a day or so her sore throat and headache turned into a mild case of flu, and she lay huddled on the sofa, with aching bones and fever, trying to pull herself over to the piano. By the day of her next lesson she was on her feet again, belting her raincoat about her, pulling on her beret, and heading for Justin’s studio.

  He seemed abstracted, standing by the window, looking down into the street as she played. She finished the Scarlatti, and then he directed her to play the Franck Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, on which she had just started to work. When she had finished, he turned toward her. ‘Katherine, there is something about your playing which puzzles me.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, and, as he didn’t answer immediately, ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘It is, but I don’t think it’s irremediable. Your technique is remarkable for someone your age, clear and brilliant and sure. And I believe in technique—don’t mistake me. But you appear afraid to let anything come through yours, and this puzzles me. There’s deep emotion in you; I sense that, though you certainly don’t show it. Not even in your playing.’

  She sat at the keyboard, nodding slowly. ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right. Maybe I haven’t got over that boarding school.’

  ‘It’s more than the school. You were badly hurt at that abominable place, but that was a child’s hurt. This is more. I think that you have been hurt now as a woman, and that you’re afraid to allow yourself to be vulnerable, for fear of being hurt again.’

  How did he know? But, tangled with self-consciousness, she said, ‘That’s an awful impression to give. Everybody gets hurt. I’m no exception. Anyhow, being hurt isn’t bad if you use it the right way.’

  ‘If you know that, why have you pulled such a tight little shell around you?’

  ‘I didn’t know that I had. I didn’t know it seemed that way. And I don’t know why it should, right now, because I’m terribly happy.’ Happy in adoration of Justin (adoration still far from being transformed into love), of learning from him, being with him once a week.

  His stern eyes became gentle. ‘Are you happy, little one?’

  ‘Can’t you tell?’

  ‘You make it difficult for people to tell anything about you.’

  ‘I don’t mean to.’

  ‘You shy away from people so. You seem afraid. For instance, I know that you haven’t been well this week. That’s a bad cough you have, and I think you still have some fever. But if I were to come over to you and put my arms around you and tell you I was sorry you feel poorly, you would stiffen up like a little ramrod. It would be like putting my arms around a poker.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Experience. Whenever I come near you, you freeze into a little icicle. Why is it?’

  She looked down at the piano keys and felt the blood mounting to her face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel that way.’

  There was a sudden silence between them. He took a step toward her, then stopped. She waited, but he didn’t approach her. Instead, he said, ‘Play the Franck and put something of yourself in it.’

  She started to play, trying to forget everything except what she wanted to tell him and could only tell him through music. She blundered a couple of times but it seemed unimportant and she continued.

  Justin said softly, ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

  Her heart began to beat violently. Her hands were cold.

  He continued. ‘You can do it, Katherine. You’re an artist. I knew there was something in you to be said, but I was beginning to wonder if you were going to be able to express it, if possibly music wasn’t the means. But it is, and you’re all right.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ Katherine whispered, but she was filled with shame. She had given him her naked heart and now she felt that she had betrayed herself because he didn’t want what she had offered (and how right he had been not to take it then, to wait).

  ‘Little one,’ he said, ‘you feel ill. Go home and go to bed. But don’t wait till next Friday to come. Have a lesson on Tuesday. I have a cancellation that afternoon.’

  ‘All right.’ She got up from the piano and stood shivering inwardly as he helped her into her raincoat.

  ‘That coat isn’t warm enough.’

  ‘I have a sweater on,’ she answered, buckling the belt. ‘I’ll come back Tuesday. Goodbye, Monsieur Vigneras.’

  ‘Now, isn’t it time you started calling me Justin?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’—Idiot, why did she say that when in her daydreams she had called him Justin forever?

  ‘Then must I start calling you Mademoiselle Forrester?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then it must be Justin. You are no longer a schoolgirl. Your music tells me that.’ How gently he had prodded her out of frightened adolescence into vulnerability.

  ‘I’ll try. But I’m in the habit of calling you Monsieur Vigneras.’

  ‘Habits can be broken.’

  ‘All right. Goodbye.’

  ‘Justin.’

  ‘Justin.’

  She did not cry until she reached the street, and then she couldn’t stop herself. She hurried through the grey winter rain, her head ducked against the wind so no one would see her tears.

  Justin was a man, and she was behaving like the adolescent she still was, offering him adulation, not daring to believe that it could be transformed into love.

  —We do change, she thought, looking briefly from the piano to Emily’s face, which was no longer closed but open, vulnerable, as she listened. She was not aware of Katherine’s glance.

  And Katherine realized that she had been playing, not what she had prepared for Felix, but the Franck.

  Justin had understood even then that the frozen child, locked into idolatry, had the capacity to become a woman. It had taken a long time for the tight bud of love to open fully, but Justin had opened it and she was still reveling in the glorious process when they had so roughly been interrupted by the occupation of Paris.

  Lukas von Hilpert, gentle and courteous and yet exigent, had said, ‘Why do you freeze every time I touch you?’

  ‘I’ve just been married. I’m a bride.’

  ‘But not a woman?’

  She flushed. ‘Yes. I am a woman. And as a woman I made marriage vows and I intend to keep them.’

  ‘That needn’t and doesn’t mean that you aren’t as attracted to me as I am to you. War is unnatural. During times of war the old rules do not hold.’

  ‘They do, for me.’

  He, in turn, had become angry. ‘Your virginal integrity is insufferable. I can take you if I want to. You have no choice.’

  But he had not taken her. And the opening bud had remained unbruised, free to grow naturally.

  6

  When she had finished the last notes of the Beethoven she realized that she was tired, and reached her arms over her head, rotating her neck slowly, doing the relaxing exercises Justin had taught her. As she turned her head she became aware of movement in one of the pews, and she saw that whoever was there was not Emily. She squinted against the light over the piano: Topaze was still there.

  “Sorry, lady. Sorry to bother you.”

  She looked at him severely. “I am trying to practice for a concert.”

  His dark eyes filled with tears. “I just wanted to sit …”

  “Very well, child, sit. But please be quiet.” She did not mean to be unkind, but he disturbed her.

  “My father’s in jail.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ma says he’s no good. He did bad things. But he makes his confession to Bishop Bodeway. He made his confession before he went to jail.”

  “Topaze”—she tried to keep her voice kind; it must be dreadful for the Gomez children to have their father in jai
l—“I’m very sorry. But it’s getting late and I don’t have much more time …”

  “Fatty told Mrs. Undercroft.”

  “Told Mrs. Undercroft what?” The child was making no sense.

  “Who goes to confession. When. I wouldn’t have told. Not that kind of thing. That’s private. Sacred. Especially Pa. I wouldn’t tell anybody anything about you. No matter for how much.”

  She did not know what he was driving at, but it was apparent that he was distressed, and that the distress went beyond his father’s jail term. “Shouldn’t you go home?” she suggested.

  He shook his head. “Can’t go till Ma’s through at Ogilvie House. Fatty and me has to wait for her at night.”

  “Sit down, then.”

  “Topaze will be quiet. Will listen.”

  Determinedly she turned away from the child, to Beethoven, trying to find ways to make the intricacies of the music collaborate with the acoustics of the chapel, working and reworking phrases until sound and space united. She forgot Topaze.

  A sharp noise startled her, probably a truck backfiring out on the street, she looked up. She did not see the child. Llew Owen was sitting in one of the pews, next to the Oriental bishop.

  Llew rose. “Madame Vigneras, we didn’t mean to disturb—”

  Her back was tired. She needed to stand and stretch. “It’s time for me to have a break. Where’s Topaze?”

  “I sent him off,” Bishop Chan said.

  Llew nodded. “He’s very upset about Bishop Juxon. Ah, Madame, Merv would have loved the way you interpreted that sonata. Beethoven was his favorite.”

  The Chinese bishop rose. It was impossible to tell his age, but his skin was like parchment; he did not look well. “You have helped us all, Madame. Merv’s murder was a great shock, and your presence and your playing have helped us to put it in perspective.”