Angel in the Parlor (5 page)

Tomorrow, he reminds himself. I'll stop by Saint Mary's tomorrow.

Seeing his visitor is about to take off his coat, Father Hayden hastily opens the door for him.

“Where do you live?” he asks gently.

The man only shakes his head.

“Let me drive you to the Salvation Army. You can stay there for two nights, and perhaps by then something will turn up for you.”

They walk briskly across the front yard to the garage, and Father Hayden helps the old man into the red Volkswagen which gleams in the light from the street. Unaccustomed to owning a car, he backs out with great caution into Mansion Street. They pass the churchyard where angels and obelisks poke through the grass like the ruined monuments of a sunken city.

“Jesus, Jesus,” whispers the little man dreamily.

Father Hayden busies himself cracking open the vent, and he hears, very clearly, the long bleat of a tugboat on the Hudson a mile away.

He turns into Main Street, brilliantly lit, empty of people. A huge Christmas tree shines in front of the public library, its gumdrop-colored lights winking randomly.

He passes under the greenery stretched across the intersection of Main and Market.

He passes the big department stores whose windows show various winter tableaux, then he passes the used furniture store, and he comes at last to a small door marked with a red shield. Paper bells hang in the windows to the right and left of it.

Father Hayden stops, but the little man does not move. Frightened, the priest touches him and, seeing him stir, he reaches across and opens the door. Slowly the man climbs out. He looks around him for a moment like a fox nosing the wind, then he crumples to his knees and touches his forehead to the pavement.

“Here,” exclaims Father Hayden, springing out to help him, “stand up now. I'll ring the bell.”

But the little man shakes his head no and bursts out laughing. The noise dies and renews itself again and again, filling the empty street like a parade. Masks of amazement peer from behind the paper bells. The man laughs and pulls out a handkerchief and flourishes it, as if preparing for some tremendous feat of conjuring. Father Hayden again reaches for the doorbell but the little man pushes him back, still laughing, still waving the handkerchief.

“Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!”

“Good night,” says Father Hayden, stiffly. The handkerchief flutters in the rearview mirror like a flag of truce all the way down Main Street, and only by turning onto Mansion Street can he push it out of his sight.

When he has parked his car in the garage, Father Hayden hurries up the steps of the parish house, reminding himself that he will very soon have a railing installed here for the old people to use in icy weather. But can he order the railing before he orders the repairs on the roof? So many people have complained about the unsightliness of the great crocks which the sexton puts in the chancel to catch the water on rainy Sundays.

Father Hayden hangs his coat on the rack in the dark corridor and steps into the comfortable warmth of his office. Peter Beasley, the deacon, is fanning the logs in the fireplace, which show no flames but send forth a pungent smoke and much crackling. He is a stocky man with a rosy, cherubic face and dark curly hair, and as he bends over the logs the rector notices with some surprise a purple flowered patch on the seat of his trousers, where the seams meet.

Tom Croft, the Sunday school superintendent, has drawn a folding chair opposite the door, so that he can watch for Father Hayden's coming, and now he stands up respectfully. He is as trim as the deacon is robust. He lives alone in a room on Mansion Street. The deacon lives in the suburbs and has a wife as large and good-natured as himself, and five children.

“Well, let's get down to business,” says Tom Croft, and he draws up the swivel chair for Father Hayden.

A long silence follows, as they all watch the fireplace hopefully. Father Hayden says, “What did you do last year at the Christmas Eve service?”

The deacon takes a large loose-leaf notebook from the coffee table and begins leafing through it, pausing to study one of the mimeographed programs collected there.

“We opened with a festival of lessons and carols. We omitted the confession of sin. And there was an anthem instead of a sermon. Ah, the fire's started.”

They watch the red tongues leap up from the logs, and move their chairs closer. Father Hayden remembers, with a pang of guilt, the good Samaritan.

“Do you remember how Father Martin hated to give sermons?” says the deacon. “Remember how he always wanted a sermon hymn?”

“That's against the new council,” says Tom Croft.

“I've already started writing my sermon,” Father Hayden assures them.

Tom Croft's face brightens.

“And what's the topic to be?”

“The fragility of the Word in the modern world,” answers Father Hayden. Seeing that the deacon is staring intently at the chandelier, he glances at it too, but sees nothing amiss.

“What I'd like,” says the deacon, “is something really high church. Incense, to start with.”

Silence.

“No incense,” says Tom Croft. “Prudence Barry doesn't like it.”

“Oh, but her sister does,” says the deacon, “so they cancel each other out. Remember how Father Clair loved to swing the censer at St. Margaret's? If that chain had broken, it would have hit the back choir. ‘We never use the bought stuff,' he told me. ‘It's too sweet. We always mix our own.'”

“You can't use incense without a reason,” says Tom Croft.

“I fear we must abandon the incense,” says Father Hayden firmly. “Don't forget the Bishop has ordered us to use the new rites printed in the green book, not the old rites in the Book of Common Prayer.”

The deacon looks round with an injured smile.

“Well, I should hate to see the old rites dropped entirely,” he says. “Why, people have nothing in common any more except the doxology.”

“The old rites are passing,” says Tom Croft quietly. “No one knows what they mean anymore. They've taken out all the saints' days and put them on weekdays, and given Sunday the prominence.”

“A pity, a pity,” sighs the deacon. “But I'll bet if I went back to the home church in North Carolina I could still find ladies who curtsied at the name of Jesus. In those days, you crossed yourself to show you were a Christian. My aunt used to cross herself as she passed the church, whenever the priest was raising the host inside.”

Father Hayden sits up straighter in his chair; he feels the evening's purpose slipping away from them.

“Peter, read us the lesson for the Christmas service. We'll start from there.”

“Where's the green book?” asks the deacon.

“Isn't it on the table? Ah, then it's been borrowed.”

“Stolen,” says Tom Croft, crisply.

The deacon picks up the Book of Common Prayer and opens it at the crimson ribbon. Then he puts it down.

“Excuse me,” he says, reaching for the Bible on Father Hayden's desk. “The lesson is from Titus two. Oh, you've got a marker in it.” And he reads very slowly.

“The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men—”

A passing ambulance drowns his voice but his lips continue to move, as if someone has turned off the sound which returns as suddenly as it has gone.

“—and our Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people—”

“Peculiar!” repeats Tom Croft.

The deacon hesitates.

“Do you want me to read the Gospel?”

“Never mind,” says Father Hayden, “we all know the Gospel.”

“But shall we have a Gospel procession?” persists the deacon. “I have to schedule the acolytes well in advance. We can use the six gold candles by the font. And I hope we'll have our crêche again, for the children.”

“God willing the dead bishop doesn't knock it down,” adds Tom Croft.

Father Hayden starts.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bishop Legg,” explains Tom Croft. “When he was rector, he hated anything to do with Christmas legends. And now every time we set up the crêche, he knocks it down. There's not a breath of wind in the sanctuary, yet every morning, right on through Epiphany, the sexton finds the figures scattered on the floor.”

“How curious,” exclaims Father Hayden.

“It was the wise men that offended the bishop,” continued Tom Croft. “He loved to remind us that the three wise men didn't come to the stable at all. They stopped at a house. It took them two years to reach Bethlehem.”

“They didn't have jobs,” adds the deacon. “Or vacations.”

A knock at the door startles them all. The sexton sticks his head into the room.

“Father, there are no more garbage bags. And there's an awful lot of garbage.”

“Well, put it out in the cans, then,” says Father Hay-den, slightly annoyed. To his own surprise, he stands up to signify that the meeting is closed.

The clock strikes eleven. Closing the door behind him he goes into his bedroom, takes off his collar, sits down on the bed, and pulls out a letter from his mother. He opens it very carefully. He has carried it all afternoon, waiting for the leisure to read it. She wishes him good holiday from his four sisters in Yarmouth and his cousins in Halifax. The weather is nippy, the grandchildren are well, thank God. Her letters sound very formal, now that her sight is bad and she has to dictate them to someone else.

His mother has never visited the States, and now she is too blind to travel. But when she was younger, what fine walks they took together along the marshes at low tide. The rushes shone bright green at their feet, lupine and morning glories lit the hill at their backs. And when the fog burned off, they arrived at the mud flats, where kelp and gull feathers lay scattered on the sand. He filled his pockets with little gray whelks and watched for porpoises on the horizon.

Easter morning before sunrise his mother fetched her best carafe and walked far out on the flats to fill it with water, which she believed was always holy at that hour and powerful against measles, gout, falling hair, and general misfortune. By the end of the year, her holy water looked so muddy that Papa said it would sooner give the gout than cure it, and he already had more patients than he could handle. His patients often invited him to dinner, and he always consented, too kindhearted to refuse though he had a horror of gaining weight. Returning home, he would retire to the bathroom and tickle his throat with a feather. The children, lying awake in their beds, heard gagging, then silence, then singing as he climbed the stairs to kiss them goodnight.

Here's to the thistle,

The bonny Scotch thistle,

The home of the free,

The badge of my country,

The thistle of Scotland

Is aye dear to me.

Papa never went to church; Mama went all the time, to the communion service on Sunday morning and morning prayer at midweek. Sunday morning she called out from the kitchen, “Who's coming with me?” The girls slouched over their toast in silence. “Heathens!” she shouted. “All of you except James!”

Father Hayden, even as a child, liked to go to church. He especially liked the churchyard, for many of the graves had small porcelain photographs fixed to their markers. The widow of an admiral, hero of many battles in World War I, had all her husband's medals engraved and enameled in color on his tombstone. He liked to run his fingers over those bright stars and crosses.

Inside the church, the boy did not go to Sunday school but stayed with his mother through the regular service. God the Father, wearing a beehive on his head, glittered in the window over the high altar (Mama called it a table); sometimes the shadows of birds darted over the glass as if God were dreaming them. The ring of candles above the communion rail was lowered and raised for special occasions. Each Sunday in Advent, the curate added another candle. Once, during the reading of the Gospel, a candle hurtled down from the ring like a falling star. The deacon sprang forward and stamped it out, fixing his eyes on the three remaining candles throughout the rest of the service. But old Father Jackson did not miss a syllable of his text.

“And that's because there's a special devil who picks up the words we drop in our prayers,” his mother warned him afterward. “His name is Titivillius, and he keeps all our lost words in a big bag. He has a bag for each one of us, and when that bag is full—watch out!”

But she never writes of this in her letters, only of the weather and births and marriages. Father Hayden folds the letter and puts it on the table by his bed. When he has finished his prayers, he undresses and lies down, and as soon as darkness settles on his eyes he sees clearly in his mind a little man in a windbreaker shuffling through a pack of cards. But now he does not look particularly lunatic, only unhappy, and Father Hayden watches his features shift like oil on water into the features of his schoolmaster, Duffey Kidd, a large, kindly man who in his spare time built a replica of Westminster Abbey out of matchsticks. He never married; he wanted to be a priest but had no money for divinity school. He earned, instead, the title of licensed chalice bearer, which allowed him to serve at communion and to walk in the litany processions. See him coming into the classroom on cold mornings, biting the fingers of his gloves, each in turn, to loosen them, then pulling till the gloves came off in his mouth, like a dog worrying a mitten. Oh, the steam on the windows, the red-hot scolding of the tiny stove which warmed only those who sat in front of it and left the rest to huddle in their wraps!

And Father Hayden laughs. And he remembers with keen pleasure walking downtown on Saturday nights. In the shadow of the Grand Hotel, young people promenaded up and down, the girls on the inside walking one way, the boys on the outside walking the other. On that sidewalk he fell in love with Helena Blackstone and brought her for Christmas a box of candy which, when she lifted the lid, let fly a blizzard of moths. She burst out laughing. He was sixteen; he never spoke to her again. Now it strikes him as marvelous that he is loved by so many women in the parish, young and old. They knit for him and bake for him, they all want to sit beside him at potlucks.