Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

“Yes,” he said. He looked around as though for help, but as was the case so often with such things, it was not available. “I mean I think we may be wrong.”

She let the words reverberate in the rectory’s quiet. Then she asked, “Prodded by conscience, are you, Father?”

“I think we’re wrong on this,” he said with sudden force. “I think women have a right. I do. Sometimes I’m ashamed to wear my collar.”

She laughed her pleasant, cultivated laughter. “Ashamed to wear your collar? Poor Frank. Afraid people will think badly of you?”

He summoned anger. “Kindly spare me the ad hominem,” he said.

“But Frank,” she said, it seemed lightly, “there is only ad hominem.”

“I’m afraid I’m not theologian enough,” he said, “to follow you there.”

“Oh,” said Mary, “I’m sorry, Father. What I mean in my crude way is that what is expected of you is expected personally. Expected directly. Of you, Frank.”

He sulked. A childish resentful silence. Then he said, “I can’t believe God wants us to persecute these young women the way you people do. I mean you particularly, Mary, with your so-called counseling.”

He meant the lectures she gave the unwed mothers who were referred to her by pamphlet. Mary had attended anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrations with pride. The abortion clinic demonstrations she undertook as an offered humiliation, standing among the transparent cranks and crazies as a penance and a curb to pride. But surprisingly, when she was done with them in private, over coffee and cake, many pregnant women brought their pregnancies to term.

She watched Father Hooke. He was without gravitas, she thought. The hands, the ineffectual sputter.

“For God’s sake,” he went on, “look at the neighborhood where you work! Do you really think the world requires a few million more black, alienated, unwanted children?”

She leaned against one of his antique chests and folded her arms. She was tall and elegant, as much an athlete and a beauty at fifty as she had ever been. Camille sat open-mouthed.

“How contemptible and dishonest of you to pretend an attack of conscience,” she told Hooke quietly. “It’s respectability you’re after. And to talk about what God wants?” She seemed to be politely repressing a fit of genuine mirth. “When you’re afraid to go out and look at his living image? Those things in the car, Frank, that poor little you are afraid to see. That’s man, guy, those little forked purple beauties. That’s God’s image, don’t you know that? That’s what you’re scared of.”

He took his glasses off and blinked helplessly.

“Your grief…” he began. A weakling, she thought, trying for the upper hand. Trying to appear concerned. In a moment he had lost his nerve. “It’s made you cruel … Maybe not cruel, but…”

Mary Urquhart pushed herself upright. “Ah,” she said with a flutter of gracious laughter, “the well-worn subject of my grief. Maybe I’m drunk again tonight, eh Father? Who knows?”

Thirteen years before on the lake outside Boston, on the second evening before Christmas, her husband had taken the children skating. First young Charley had wanted to go and Charles had demurred; he’d had a few drinks. Then he had agreed in his shaggy, teasing, slow-spoken way — he was rangy, wry, a Carolina Scot like Mary. It was almost Christmas and the kids were excited and how long would it stay cold enough to skate? Then Payton had demanded to go, and then finally little Emily, because Charles had taught them to snap the whip on ice the day before. And the lake, surrounded by woods, was well lighted and children always skated into the night although there was one end, as it turned out, where the light failed, a lonely bay bordered with dark blue German pine where even then maybe some junkie had come out from Roxbury or Southie or Lowell or God knew where and destroyed the light for the metal around it. And Emily still had her cold and should not have gone.

But they went and Mary waited late, and sometimes, listening to music, having a Wild Turkey, she thought she heard voices sounding strange. She could remember them perfectly now, and the point where she began to doubt, so faintly, that the cries were in fun.

The police said he had clung to the ice for hours, keeping himself alive and the children clinging to him, and many people had heard the calling out but taken it lightly.

She was there when the thing they had been was raised, a blue cluster wrapped in happy seasonal colors, woolly reindeer hats and scarves and mittens, all grasping and limbs intertwined, and it looked, she thought, like a rat king, the tangle of rats trapped together in their own naked tails and flushed from an abandoned hull to float drowned, a raft of solid rat on the swells of the lower Cape Fear River. The dead snarls on their faces, the wild eyes, a paradigm she had seen once as a child she saw again in the model of her family. And near Walden Pond, no less, the west wind slept on the lake, eyes glimmered in the silver dusk, a dusk at morning. She had lost all her pretty ones.

“Because,” she said to Father Hooke, “it would appear to me that you are a man — and I know men, I was married to a man — who is a little boy, a little boy-man. A tiny boy-man, afraid to touch the cross or look in God’s direction.”

He stared at her and swallowed. She smiled as though to reassure him.

“What you should do, Father is this. Take off the vestments you’re afraid to wear. Your mama’s dead for whom you became a priest. Become the nice little happy homosexual nonentity you are.”

“You are a cruel bitch,” Hooke said, pale-faced. “You’re a sick and crazy woman.”

Camille in her chair began to gasp. Mary bent to attend her.

“Camille? Do you have your inhaler?”

Camille had it. Mary helped her adjust it and waited until her friend’s breathing was under control. When she stood up, she saw that Father Hooke was in a bad way.

“You dare,” Mary said to him, “you wretched tiny man, to speak of black unwanted children? Why, there is not a suffering black child — God bless them all — not a black child in this unhappy foolish country that I would not exalt and nourish on your goddamn watery blood. I would not risk the security of the most doomed, lost, deformed black child for your very life, you worthless pussy!”

Father Hooke had become truly upset. My Lord, she thought, now I’ve done it. Now I’ll see the creature cry. She looked away.

“You were my only friend,” Father Hooke told her when he managed to speak again. “Did you know that?”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, Father. I suppose I have my ignorant cracker side and God help me I am sick and I am crazy and cruel. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Pray for me.”

Hooke would not be consoled. Kind-hearted Camille, holding her inhaler, took a step toward him as though she might help him somehow go on breathing.

“Get out,” he said to them. “Get out before I call the police.”

“You have to try to forgive me, Charles.” Had she called him Charles? How very strange. Poor old Charles would turn in his grave. “Frank, I mean. You have to try and forgive me, Frank. Ask God to forgive me. I’ll ask God to forgive you. We all need it, don’t we, Father.”

“The police!” he cried, his voice rising. “Because those things, those goddamn things in your car! Don’t you understand? People accuse us of violence!” he shouted. “And you are violence!” Then he more or less dissolved.

She went and put a hand on his shoulder as Camille watched in amazement.

“God forgive us, Frank.” But he leaned on the back of his leather easy chair and turned from her, weeping. “Oh Frank, you lamb,” she said, “what did your poor mama tell you? Did she say that a world with God was easier than one without him?”