Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“That’s OK,” Stack said. “Not your fault.”

They placed Maud’s ashes in a curtained room behind the funeral home’s office.

“You weren’t drinking today, were you, Mr. Stack?”

“Not for the last two days. I’m still buzzing, though. Still intoxicated.”

“I’m sure they’ll see their way clear. They’re a very stuffy bunch here. And Washington, he’s a difficult man.”

“Have you been drinking, Mr. McCallum?”

McCallum smiled and wiped his brow again.

“Not for eleven years,” he said.

JO NEVER HEARD FROM Edward Stack about whatever arrangement he had made for Maud’s interment with her mother. When she checked with Lieutenant Salmone, she learned that Maud’s remains had been sent to New York. However, Salmone told her, the church in Nassau County was making difficulties. And there was no further word on the car or the driver.

After thinking about it Jo decided to call Dean Spofford’s wife, Mary Pick, at her New York auction house. Mary said she would stop in on the way home.

From her nearly sidewalk-level corner window Jo saw Mary Pick’s hired car swing around the square and stop in front of the one-way sign at the end of Jo’s block. She watched the rain spot the tops of Mary’s shapely Cole-Haan shoes as the dean’s lady came briskly to the counseling center’s door.

Jo and Mary had each soldiered through the unraveling ranks of the Catholic religion on various of its forced marches through the abysmal sleep of reason. They had both borne the guidon Credo quia absurdum. Mary, bred in the bone, had proved the stauncher trooper, with a commando’s grip on absurdum. Jo had taken a deep breath and bailed, and felt just fine on her own two feet. Nevertheless they had become acquainted through Jo’s contacts with members of the Newman Club, which had once included Maud Stack. What they had been compelled to know, believe and not believe, served to make them close friends at the college. Even to the point that Jo had accompanied Mary on a few of her dawn patrols to St. Blaise’s, strictly as an observer. She could risk being seen in that company. Jo also knew things many did not about her friend.

Mary Pick’s first husband had been blown in half, and her son almost completely blinded, by an IRA bomb placed under an ice cream vendor’s truck in Belfast on a May Day afternoon. Thereafter it was never pointed out in her hearing that Captain Pick had been present as a British official in Ireland attendant on government service. As it happened, Picks had been Catholics since the Conqueror, and had chosen to surrender their estates and preferments at the Reformation to remain so for the next four hundred years. Mary Pick had taken her cranky blinded eleven-year-old boy for an endless train ride down France to Lourdes, in the course of which she had been subjected to many tearful questions. Lourdes had not provided the hoped-for intercession, so there was the desolate ride back. Now Mary Pick was at the college, married to the agnostic, rather saturnine John Spofford. Her son, tall and possessed of his father’s military bearing, was now a Labour member of Parliament distinguished by the white-painted, leather-handled shepherd’s crook he used as a guide stick, a small joke of his own. He was married to a famous London journalist not warmly loved by Mary Pick.

Jo told Mary about the contretemps with the church on Long Island.

“We should profane the service of the dead,” Mary Pick recited.

Jo, startled a moment, understood that she was quoting Hamlet.

“Surely they don’t keep that kind of score, Mary.”

“The priests have become very arrogant. Again.”

“Their cause seems to be prospering in spite of every revelation,” she told Mary. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Their cause? I don’t know what cause they serve, some of these men.”

Jo got up from the desk and turned on the room’s overhead fluorescent lights. One of them nursed an irritating hum. She looked out at the puddles in the street through the wire mesh that encased the windows. The mesh dated from the days when the old building was a city school to be protected from errant fly balls.

“I’m concerned for the father,” Jo said, keeping an eye on the rain. “He’s elderly and now he’s alone. A widower. Retired policeman. No other kids. A bitter, bitter man. Drinks. He’s lost to the living world soon.”

“Did he know she’d had an abortion?”

“She never did have one. That’s what she told me, and I certainly believed her.”

“Funny,” said Mary.

“You could kind of tell it in the piece she wrote. That it was by someone outside the process.”

“How strange,” Mary said. “I thought that as well.” She smiled faintly. “I thought, What a vain creature. How little she knows.”

“I understand the bishop down on Long Island doesn’t want to put Maud’s ashes in the crypt — in the niche, whatever — with her mother. It would just be a favor, a neat thing to do. But he wants her father to commission a formal Mass of interment. In other words, come crawling and they’ll take her home.”

They sat on the table at opposite ends under the ugly whining light.

“Oh, the bishop’s an old skunk, isn’t he?” Mary said. “Wants her father to remember his daughter as a pagan and a sinner and a disgrace to her mother. With whom she will never be reunited. But he can’t pretend to cut a Christian soul off from her salvation. Over a piece written by an adolescent in a college newspaper.”

“He’s probably incapable of thinking it through that far, Mary. Who knows what he believes? Who knows who he is? What kind of people become bishops anymore?”

Jo got up and switched off the ceiling light, to kill its glare and turn off its noise.

“Quite all right,” Mary said, “some of them.”

“Really? If you say so. But you’re a very tolerant person.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mary Pick. “I’ve never been told that before.”

Jo sat and watched her elegant friend.

“I want to ask you something. I have to ask it. But I’m afraid you won’t be my friend anymore after I do.”

“Oh, my,” Mary said. “Let’s see.”

“How can you align yourself — a person like you — how can you ally yourself with such terrorizing by such people?”

“I can’t, because I don’t. I am not an activist or an agitator. I can only tell you why I couldn’t have had an abortion. Why I think people shouldn’t do it. But you’ll know all about that.”

“Yes.”

“If anyone asks me,” Mary said, “I’ll say don’t do it. There are people who don’t believe human life starts at conception. I can’t prove them wrong. We are taught that the universe is beautiful. We believe it is good. We believe its phenomena reflect a perfection beyond our understanding but that we can partly experience. Sort of. Man — I should say humankind, shouldn’t I? — is also sacred. Reflecting that being we know as God. Matter, stuff, quickened to human life, is therefore sacred. At the moment, we are taught this quickening happens on conception.”

“At the moment.”

“We don’t argue, do we, because this is dogma, isn’t it?” Mary said. “That is the inspired teaching at the present time. Faith. A being sacred in that way is not to be destroyed at will. Cannot be judged worthy of destruction for individual or general human advantage. That’s the Church’s teaching and that’s the faith one practices.”

“And everyone else has to practice it too?”

“I hold sacred what is declared sacred. The law of the state cannot justify abortion. It isn’t the law of the state that makes human life sacred. It can’t determine what is mortal sin or blasphemy. It can’t punish spiritual crimes. It can’t presume to speak for God.”