Ghost Country (43 page)

Rafe, annoyed at the loss of attention, called the congregation to order in his loud hoarse voice. “We’re committing fresh sins while we’re asking God to forgive old ones.”

Pastor Emerson noticed with satisfaction that this was too unctuous even for Mrs. Thirkell, while Sylvia Lenore, in the front pew the Lenore family had occupied since her great-grandfather endowed the church in 1893, gave pantomimed nausea. The two women sitting with her snickered.

Waiting now to be sure he had everyone’s attention, Emerson moved to the peroration of his sermon. “Who among you here, my brothers and sisters, can step forward to receive Ezekiel’s mark of salvation? Who here has not been tempted by rumors of miracles into praying at that wall? The women who tempt the weak into worshiping there are the same harlots, practicing the same abominations that Ezekiel saw a thousand years before the birth of Christ. They are committing the same evils that John foresaw in his Revelation in the first century. Harlots and mothers of harlots. Daughters of harlots. Like the poor, they are always with us. Turn your back on them. More than that, eradicate them from our midst, so that we may be found worthy of that holy city, the New Jerusalem, adorned in purity as a bride for her bridegroom. Amen.”

A buzz of approval drifted up to Emerson as the choir began an anthem. He was a good, really an inspired preacher, but his sermons often didn’t wholly please the more fundamentalist members of the congregation. Today, though, he had given them exactly the kind of message they preferred: strongly grounded in the Bible, condemnatory of outside sinners, congratulatory to their own righteousness. As the preparatory words for the communion part of the service began, they pulled out billfolds with more alacrity than usual.

Mrs. Ephers, Rafe, and the other deacons went to the chancel. After Pastor Emerson pronounced the words of commemoration
over the bread, the deacons carried it to the congregation. When they had offered bread to everyone, they returned to the chancel to serve each other, and finally, last of all—for the last shall be first—the pastor. Emerson next spoke the commemorative words over the grape juice. The deacons took the trays of little glasses and again began serving the congregation.

Dr. Stonds drank, made a startled face and sniffed the empty glass. A ripple moved through the rows as each person swallowed. It was wine. Not juice, but wine. Whose idea was this, and on such a day, to insult them by substituting wine for the pure unfermented juice of the grape? Sylvia Lenore? Was that why she’d come to a service she disapproved of? The Jewish doctor? Had he put Harriet under his thrall and persuaded her to sacrilege?

By the time the pastor and the deacons drank, the noise in the congregation had become the titillated hum of hornets. Emerson was aware of the uproar, but not until he drank—last of anyone in the church—did he understand the cause.

“Who did this?” the pastor angrily demanded of his deacons.

“Cynthia Lowrie was up here with the jugs when I came out to look for her right before the service,” Mrs. Ephers announced.

No one in the congregation could hear what was said in the chancel, but they all saw Rafe’s face turn red. He seemed to swell like a balloon, Hector thought, wondering why the congregation was so upset. Don’t Christians use wine at their communion services? he whispered to Harriet. She tried to explain that some Protestant denominations, like this one, were governed by teetotalers, but Hector couldn’t hear her over the noise.

Rafe went to the microphone in the middle of the chancel. “Cynthia Jane Lowrie, come forward.”

The angry buzz died down as people craned their necks to watch. Cynthia didn’t move.

“Cynthia Jane Lowrie, come forward to explain yourself,” Rafe repeated.

Jared stood and yanked his sister out of the pew. He trampled
on the feet of Mrs. Thirkell and Mr. Stith, who were sitting by the aisle. Some in the church, like Sylvia Lenore and her friends, stirred uneasily, but no one moved to help Cynthia. Jared shoved her up the walkway; when she tried to hold on to a pew back for support, the brother dragged her bodily up the shallow steps to the chancel.

“Cynthia Lowrie,” Rafe said into the microphone when she reached his side. “What did you do to the communion juice?’

Those close to the front could see the pleasure shining below the fierceness of Rafe’s voice. The noise in the pews died away as people leaned forward to watch.

“Nothing,” Cynthia whispered, her answer inaudible to the rest of the congregation.

“Don’t lie to me, not in this house of worship under the eyes of Almighty God, Cynthia Jane. Mrs. Ephers said just now that she found you alone in church with the communion jugs. What did you put into them? Tell us the truth.”

“I didn’t,” she wailed as Rafe stuck the microphone under her nose. “I came in here and found Mara Stonds with that woman. They were drinking out of the jugs and I made them leave, I never thought they were doing something to the grape juice.”

“Mara!” Mrs. Ephers hissed behind Cynthia. “You made her leave? I was standing right next to you and you didn’t tell me she was in the church? What was going through your mind, or does nothing ever go through that tapioca pudding you have between your ears?”

Cynthia started to cry. Her gulping sobs were magnified by the PA system. Mr. Stith and Mrs. Thirkell watched greedily.

Harriet had heard Mrs. Ephers say those words a hundred times, no, more like a thousand—every time Mara did something that was too impulsive for the tomblike calm at Graham Street. For the first time Harriet seemed to feel them, the blow to the heart that lay in the scornful words, as harsh as the blow to the face that would follow. She was on her feet, pushing past Hector into the aisle,
knowing the second before the microphone amplified the smack of palm on flesh that Mrs. Ephers would slap Cynthia.

“Don’t start sniveling to me, young lady.”
Thwack.
“Where did she go?”

“You heard her, girl,” Rafe put in. “What were they doing, trying to put on a black mass? Where are they?”

Harriet, with Hector on her heels, reached the chancel steps as Rafe’s fist was swinging reflexively toward his daughter’s face. Harriet tried to grab his arm, and ended up taking the blow herself. Hector caught her as she staggered under the impact.

“They’re up there, they’re up there,” Cynthia wailed, pointing at the gallery. “Don’t hit me, Daddy.”

Harriet and Hector, Rafe and Mrs. Ephers, the pastor, the whole congregation, twisted their necks, but could see nothing in the upper reaches of the nave. There was a brief silence—the electric quiet between the fork of lightning and the roaring sheet metal of thunder—and then Jared led a surge of men down the aisle to the rear. Their feet pounded up the stairs, along the stone floor of the gallery, a pack of elephant-sized hounds: the cries, the yelps of gladness as they found their prey and dragged it with them into the body of the church.

Harriet gripped Hector’s hand so tightly that she left bruises on his palm. From the top of the chancel stairs she could see Mara wrapped tight in Jared’s arms, Starr and Luisa behind them with three other homeless women whom she recognized from her visits to the wall.

Harriet longed to go to her sister, but the crowd between them was as impenetrable as a sea of boulders. “Oh, Mara, oh, Beebie.”

The mike picked up the whispered words and carried them beneath the mob’s roar to Mara. She saw Harriet’s white strained face at the top of the stairs, heard her involuntary cry, smiled: Harriet didn’t hate her, after all.

As soon as Rafe called Cynthia to him Mara knew they would be betrayed: Cynthia was too cowed, not so much by her nineteen
years with him, as by her return to him after her brief night of freedom.

Mara whispered to Jacqui that they should leave: there was only one way out of the gallery, down the stairs past the choir loft, but they could escape now, before Cynthia pointed them out; they’d have a head start, they might be able to run somewhere. But where? Jacqui whispered back: they were rabbits in an open field surrounded by hunters. And then the hounds were on them, they were seized, shamefully without landing as much as a kick on men who grabbed them, hit them, pinched their breasts as they wrapped thick arms about them. Even Starr seemed powerless against that pack.

The men surged up the chancel steps with their bundles and stood panting in front of the pastor. In the congregation people climbed up on the pews to have a better view. So this was that creature. Mrs. Thirkell turned to comment to Mr. Stith, sitting on her left, and withdrew from him in disgust: his face glowed with avidity. He was leaning forward to stare more closely at Starr; a thin thread of drool bubbled from the corner of his mouth.

Patsy Wanachs, sitting behind Mrs. Thirkell, tapped her on the shoulder: Look—those are some of the women we put up in the shelter. Mrs. Thirkell, turning around, glad to escape the sight of Mr. Stith: It just goes to show. Sylvia Lenore will be eating her words now. Give them an inch and they take total advantage. I never thought that shelter was a good idea.

Sylvia was conferring worriedly with her own friends: This is looking really bad; we should try to stop this, but—stupid to call the cops to come to a church service—go to the front, try to reason with people? Shut off the sound system?

Rafe tried to make the congregation attend to him. “We just heard a condemnation of the harlots and daughters of harlots who’ve defiled our city. Here they stand in front of us. What shall we do with them?” His hoarse voice made no impression on the uproar in the pews.

Pastor Emerson grabbed the mike. “You women have desecrated the House of God. What do you have to say for yourselves?”

His voice thundered through the congregation. As his parishioners grew quiet he repeated the question. Luisa Montcrief slipped from her captor’s slackened clasp and moved to the microphone. To the fury of everyone in the chancel she began to sing.

L
UISA WONDERED WHY
they were in a church, Had Mara engaged her to sing at communion without telling her? Was that what she and Jacqui were whispering about up in the gallery? Then the audience came to fetch her, wondering where she was, but no need to hold her so roughly.

Well, if it was a church service, they no doubt wanted a religious aria. They were an ignorant rude bunch, probably only able to recognize Schubert’s cloying, overperformed “Ave Maria.” She listened for a pitch in her head, and began to sing.

To her dismay, instead of the sweet B-flat of the Schubert, she produced Verdi’s somber E-flat. In her mind she heard the urgent violins produce the minor chord. Against her will, against all her efforts to banish the aria from her mind, she was singing Desde-mona’s “Ave Maria” from the last act of
Otello.

And then the angry tenor was standing over her, his face swollen, as it had been in her dreams since that dreadful night at the Met. You bitch, shut up. This is a church, not a carnival.

She shut her eyes and let her voice rise to the high A. Yes, she had come down on the note, they were wrong, those fools who said she was a spent force,
Now that red-faced cretin was shouting over the music, not trying to sing, not even saying the lines right, speaking English, not Italian.
“Prostituta,”
yes, he was calling her a whore, telling her to be quiet. Idiot; didn’t he know that came in previous scene? And then his hands were around her throat again and he was lifting her by her neck, her voice, her voice, he would destroy it forever. A babble from the chorus, they were trying to stop him. Her maid was screaming for help, but Luisa was falling down a hole that had no end. She was cold, colder even than Desdemona’s chastity: perhaps she, too, would be gathered into heaven.

R
AFE’S RAGE
was extreme. He was sick and tired of goddamn women totally out of control, snotty libbers like that frozen bitch Harriet Stonds taking jobs that men ought to be doing, his wife walking out on him, humiliating him, his daughter sneaking around behind his back, and now this—this field-bitch, preening herself in front of the congregation, smirking when he told her to shut up in church, closing her eyes on him, singing louder, until he had no choice, she forced him to act to preserve the sanctity of the sanctuary, He wasn’t trying to hurt her, just to make her behave. It was Harriet Stonds and that Jewish doctor grabbing his arm who did the damage. Rafe shoved them aside and flung Luisa away from the microphone.

Her head struck the corner of the stone communion table and she fell backward, sprawling across the chancel steps. Her neck flopped to one side, like a sparrow that has broken itself against a plate glass window.

Mara was screaming. “You killed her, you killed her.”

Rafe wanted to take a swipe at Mara, too: couldn’t Abraham
Stonds control his damned granddaughter, not let her howl like a fucking banshee in front of God and everyone?

From his front-row pew, Dr. Stonds observed Mara with distaste. He had forgotten how ugly she was, and now, with her head shaved, her clothes filthy—the contrast between her and Harriet, so cool and clean nearby, had never been greater, only now Harriet was turning on him, too, flaunting herself in front of the congregation with that useless resident of Hanaper’s.

And now the young man was kneeling over Luisa Montcrief. Clumsy oaf, shouldn’t be allowed to touch someone with a broken neck, although Stonds thought she probably was dead, judging from the strange angle at which she lay. Harry Minsky was lucky, really, his sister off his hands, even if it was a tragedy, well, a scandal, Luisa dying in church. Rafe Lowrie, no sympathy to waste there, Stonds would have to call it murder if the police asked him. Still, he was the best neurosurgeon in the city, perhaps in North America, maybe young Vitibsky at Stanford could give him a run for his money; he’d better stop young Tammuz from touching Luisa, see if the famous hands of Abraham Stonds could do anything for her.

The congregation surged forward with him as Dr. Stonds made his way up the chancel steps. No one noticed the Channel 13 crew come in through the great entrance doors at the back. So intent was everyone on the drama in the chancel that the hot lights, the cameras, and Don Sandstrom with his ubiquitous mike climbing up to the gallery to get a good angle on a great story (mayhem in a rich city church unfolding live for you on your television screen) didn’t exist behind them.