Part 9 (1/2)

Her gravity made him laugh. ”I'm not dying. I think I'll calm down soon.”

”We were only married for a year. I was being left when you were marrying your wife.”

”And do you feel better now?”

”Oh, yes. A million times. Today, in fact, I'm happy as a lark. But I think that's the new bunk beds, and the crib, and the children.”

”We didn't have children.”

As of course she knew. As everyone knew. ”That was hard, was it?”

”It would have been easier, better for us, perhaps, if we...I wanted to very much.”

She looked at his face, what she could see of it, his head still bowed in his hands.

”You would have enjoyed having children,” she said. ”From the little I know of the whole business. I'm certainly enjoying it, in between the worry.”

”I should have gone out and found some,” he said.

Late at night Dolly and Trevor lay in their new beds. Trevor was sleeping, but Dolly kept herself awake. She could hear Clary walking down the hall to her room. Crooning to Pearce, telling him some story about how good he was, what a good boy. You start out good, and then you turn into Dad, or Gran. How does that happen? Or you start out good and you get sick-No talking about her mother. She quickly switched it to Paul. He must be good, he was the priest. He had a big b.u.mp on his forehead.

Darwin. Darwin is the best of our family, she thought. She could think about Darwin as she went to sleep, as long as she didn't think of him at the where-he-was. He would be sleeping on the pullout couch in the bas.e.m.e.nt tomorrow, he would be there.

Clara's spine had grown used to the living-room chesterfield, and back in her bed she had a ragged sleep. About midnight Pearce woke, hot and cranky. She gave him a sponge bath by the kitchen sink, with only the stove light on in the dim night kitchen. Poor lamb. Was this mild fever from illness, or new teeth coming in? Or withdrawal from the Benadryl. He was good-natured about it, lying peacefully on the towel as she sluiced him with trickles of water. His legs slid open and relaxed, and he turned his melon head on his small neck to look at the dark gleaming window over the sink, and through the window, to the moon s.h.i.+ning out there in the night.

”There is the world,” Clara told him. ”There is the moon.”

He reached his finger out to it, and looked back at her, to make sure she saw too. Beloved. She dabbed him dry with a couple of tea-towels from the drawer, so the water could evaporate and cool him that way. She dried between his fingers and his beautiful toes while he stared and stared at her, at the amazing presence of another human being. Clara had never understood that a baby could be so physically, solidly satisfying. When she picked him up to take him back to the crib he put his arm around her neck in a tender way, a partner in this. Not only a baby but a person, too, already.

Pearce was still staring at the bears in his crib when Clara heard a noise from the children's room. It was Trevor, awake and crying.

”My mom,” he said-she could hardly make it out. She lifted him down off the bunk, took him to her room and tucked him into her bed. His shuddering gradually calmed.

Dolly appeared at the door. One a.m. ”What's wrong?” she asked, tears in her eyes too.

”They're fine, Dolly. Come and sit with Trevor for a minute, and we'll see if we can sing Pearce to sleep.”

Clara went to their room, opened the window and left the curtains open, plumped up their pillows and added a fleece blanket over Trevor's duvet. Then she put them back to bed. She sat in the semi-cave of the lower bunk, smoothing Dolly's s.h.i.+n; Pearce lay curled on her lap, happy to be held.

”Betty Pringle, she had a pig,” Clara sang for Trevor, and he chimed in softly, almost with the tune. ”As on my way to Strawberry Fair,” she sang, and ”Baby's boat is silver moon, sailing in the sky.” She felt Dolly going limp as she patted her, and heard her breathing change. She stopped singing.

”That was wonderful,” Trevor said from above her.

Clara sat on in the little cave, wondering if she would be able to recall this later, when she was an old woman alone in some nursing-home, if she would remember Trevor saying wonderful, and the sleeping weight of Pearce on her lap, and Dolly under her hand, and how she'd done that herself, put them at ease, even though they were not her own.

She counted to a hundred. Then she got up, slow and fluid. She glided Pearce down into his crib so that he didn't wake, and got herself back into bed. Out in the hall Mrs. Pell's door opened and closed, and the bathroom door. In a few minutes the toilet flushed, and Mrs. Pell stalked back down the hall to the kitchen, feet clomping on the tiles. Maybe her feet hurt. Some while later Mrs. Pell woke her again, shutting her bedroom door loudly, with who knows what in her hands, what mess. It didn't matter. Clara turned over and s.h.i.+fted her pillow and went back to sleep for the last four hours of the night.

11. Melancholy.

His car not being completely reliable, Paul took the bus to the Diocesan office in Regina to see the suffragan bishop. On the way down he read Stevie Smith (hardly a Christian poet, although presumably Anglican), her lines tramping through his head to the thrumming drone of the bus vibrating along the empty highway. Can G.o.d, / Stone of man's thoughts, be good? / Say rather it is enough / That the stuffed / Stone of man's good, growing, / By man's called G.o.d.

He had been leaving the church on Monday when the bishop's secretary called to ask him to come in on Tuesday. Short notice. Away, Melancholy, away with it, let it go.

The bus got in to Regina early, and Paul walked around the city aimlessly for an hour, dismayed as always by the number of street people, giving away all his change and two tens he happened to find in his pocket. When he arrived, on time, he still had to wait. The secretary gave him a plastic cone cup of coffee, the vessel he most despised. He fixed the cone more firmly in the holder and doled out cream powder, missing his own bad coffee. Bishop Vivian Porter, the first woman prelate in the diocese. Lisanne, suspicious, always waited to catch him in a compromising glance with Bishop Porter. He should have had the courage to scotch her stupid jealousy, for her own sake as well as his comfort.

When she appeared, the bishop was wearing a purple wool dress, a nod to her position, and suede shoes so velvety-looking that Paul had to suppress a sudden desire to stroke them.

”You're showing strain,” the bishop said. She held his hand for a minute.

He forced himself not to give an airy laugh, not to sally.

”Come in,” she said. ”We'll be quiet in here.”

Her office was a comfortable room. Much improved since her predecessor. (”Much improved since her predecessor,” he heard Clara repeat. He was stilted even in his thoughts.) ”What a good room,” he said. ”You've made it very handsome.” (Handsome? Fine! He spoke as he spoke!) Vivian Porter reached up and let her hand slide down the towering gold velvet drapes. ”I love these, don't you? My daughter did them up for me. And they have a secret, subversive side-look-” She turned back the ecclesiastical velvet to reveal the lining: cherry stripes on a lime green ground.

”Perfect,” he said. He sank into one of the leather chairs by her desk. His knees seemed too large together. He splayed them apart, but that looked clumsy. He put his jacket on his lap and tried to forget himself. No matter how kindly Vivian arranged things, this summons was a visit to the headmaster. There must be something very wrong.

She patted the drapes back, their sober sides out, and got down to it. ”I received an awkward phone message yesterday from your warden. Rather than reply myself, I wanted to see if we could together come up with a response.” She leaned forward to the machine on her desk, the gold chain weighing down her bodice. She was fiftyish, young for a bishop, and intelligent. He admired and respected her.

A click, then the tape beginning.

”This is Candy Vincent calling, the people's warden from St. Anne's. I'm sorry to bother you with something so-hm. But I didn't know whom to-to whom-to tell.” Candy Vincent's familiar screechy voice filled the room, and filled the s.p.a.ces inside his head. What was it going to be? His stomach was roiling. That hm of hers. The tape ran on, the voice ran on.

”Father Paul's wife-Lisanne Tippett-” Paul laughed, he couldn't help himself. He had heard her say Xanthippe, rather than Lisanne Tippett. It struck him, sharp as a smack: he had married Socrates' shrew of a wife. He had a moment of pure pleasure at the ludicrous joke of the world, and cla.s.sical studies, and the joke of himself, his own ridiculous self.

Vivian Porter looked up at him, lines on her forehead as her eyebrows double-arched. He shook his head, which she took to be an answer of some kind.

Candy had gathered momentum. Paul could picture her holding one of the fundraising chocolates, at Tuesday's vestry meeting, talking while the chocolate melted in her solid fingers.

”She has never been involved in the parish, but there's no escaping the fact: she wrote an article on-” It would take her a moment to get that out, Paul thought. ”On masturbation.”

There was a pause, a quiet s.p.a.ce on the tape. Chocolate on her hands.

Vivian Porter's mouth had turned up at one corner. Possibly smiling, Paul thought. Difficult not to, at the word, at the word coming from Candy Vincent. ”And other things-equipment.”

The bishop pressed the stop b.u.t.ton. ”That's enough, I think.”

Paul was mainly conscious of relief that it had been something to do with Lisanne rather than himself. They sat comfortably enough, knowing one another to that limited degree that let them expect the best of each other. The bishop would not be unreasonable, Paul would not be defensive, and what Lisanne wrote was not the diocese's business anyway.

”But it's awkward,” Paul acknowledged. ”Lisanne and I are-dissolving our-” He had sawdust, leafmould in his mouth. ”She's left me. We will probably divorce. I only say probably because I still hope for a better resolution. Lisanne has no such hope.” Man, too, hurries, Eats, couples, buries, He is an animal also. With a hey ho melancholy, away with it, let it go... ”The article was written more than a year ago, a commission. It's hardly a s.e.x magazine, it's Women's Fitness. The swimsuit issue is sought after, I understand, but the general tone of the magazine is clinical.”

”How long have you been married?”

”I suppose a long time-nineteen years. We were married as students...”