Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

She gave Father Hooke a last friendly pat and turned to Camille. “Because that would be mistaken, wouldn’t it, Camille?”

“Oh, you’re right,” Camille hastened to say. The tearful priest had moved her too. But still she was dry-eyed, staring, Alexandrian. “You’re so right, Mary.”

When they were on the road again it was plain Camille Innaurato was exhausted.

“So, Mary,” she asked. “So where’re we going now, honey?”

“Well,” Mary said, “as it happens, I have another fella up my sleeve.” She laughed. “Yes, another of these worthies Holy Mother Church provides for our direction. Another selfless man of the cloth.”

“I’ll miss Mass tomorrow.”

“This is Mass,” Mary said.

“Right. OK.”

This is Mass, she thought, this is the sacrifice nor are we out of it. She reached over and gave Camille a friendly touch.

“You don’t work tomorrow, do you, love?”

“Naw, I don’t,” Camille said. “I don’t, but…”

“I can take you home. I can get this done myself.”

“No,” said Camille, a little cranky with fatigue. “No way.”

“Well, we’ll get these children blessed, dear.”

The man Mary had up her sleeve was a priest from Central Europe called Monsignor Danilo. It was after ten when Mary telephoned him from a service station, but he hurriedly agreed to do what she required. He was smooth and obsequious and seemed always ready to accommodate her.

His parish, St. Macarius, was in an old port town on Newark Bay, and to get there they had to retrace their drive through the country and then travel south past several exits of the Garden State.

It took them nearly an hour, even with the sparse traffic. The church and its rectory were in a waterfront neighborhood of refineries and wooden tenements little better than the ones around Temple Street. The monsignor had arranged to meet them in the church.

The interior was an Irish-Jansenist nightmare of tarnished marble, white-steepled tabernacles and cream columns. Under a different patron, it had served the Irish dockers of a hundred years before. Its dimensions were too mean and narrow to support the mass of decoration, and Father Danilo’s bunch had piled the space with their icons, vaguely Byzantine Slavic saints and Desert Fathers and celebrity saints in their Slavic aspect.

Candles were flickering as the two women entered. The place smelled of wax, stale wine and the incense of past ceremony. Mary carried the babies under their purple cloth.

Monsignor Danilo waited before the altar, at the end of the main aisle. He wore his empurpled cassock with surplice and a silk stole. His spectacles reflected the candlelight.

Beside him stood a tall, very thin, expressionless young man in cassock and surplice. The young man, in need of a shave, held a paten on which cruets of holy water and chrism and a slice of lemon had been set.

Monsignor Danilo smiled his lupine smile, and when Mary had set the babies down before the altar, he took her hand in his. In the past he had sometimes kissed it; tonight he pressed it to his breast. The intrusion of his flabby body on her senses filled Mary with loathing. He paid no attention to Camille Innaurato and he did not introduce the server.

“Ah,” he said, bending to lift the curtain under which the creatures lay, “the little children, no?”

She watched him regard the things with cool compassion, as though he were moved by their beauty, their vestigial humanity, the likeness of their Creator. But perhaps, she thought, he had seen ghastly sights before and smiled on them. Innocent as he might be, she thought, he was the reeking model of every Jew-baiting, clerical fascist murderer who ever took orders east of the Danube. His merry countenance was crass hypocrisy. His hands were huge, thick-knuckled, the hands of a brute, as his face was the face of a smiling Cain.

“So beautiful,” he said. Then he said something in his native language to the slovenly young man, who looked at Mary with a smirk and shrugged and smiled in a vulgar manner. She did not let her gaze linger.

Afterward, she would have to hear about Danilo’s mother and her trip to behold the apparition of the Virgin in some Bessarabian or Balkan hamlet and the singular misfortunes, historically unique, of Danilo’s native land. And she would have to give him at least seventy-five dollars or there would be squeals and a disappointed face. And now something extra for the young man, no doubt an illegal alien, jumped-ship and saving his pennies.

Camille Innaurato breathed through her inhaler. Father Danilo took a cruet from the paten and with his thick fingers sprinkled a blessing on the lifeless things. Then they all faced the altar and the Eastern crucifix that hung suspended there. They prayed together in the Latin each knew:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

Miserere nobis.

Finally, she was alone with the ancient Thing before whose will she still stood amazed, whose shadow and line and light they all were: the bad priest and the questionable young man and Camille Innaurato, she herself and the unleavened flesh fouling the floor. Adoring, defiant, in the crack-house flicker of that hideous, consecrated half-darkness, she offered It Its due, by old command.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,

Have mercy on us.

MACKAY ONCE described himself as “the last orphan.” He has a forlorn and humorous manner that makes his friends delight in the phrase. Some of them use it behind his back.

As a child of five, Mackay was sent to an institution operated by a Catholic order of teaching brothers. Though it was described as a boarding school, the male children who attended St. Michael’s were all homeless to a greater or lesser degree, and many had lost, one way or another, both parents. About half had been enrolled by surviving relatives, who paid the Pauline Brothers a tuition that, in the mid-1940s, amounted to fifty dollars a year. Others had been placed there by the family-court system through the network of Catholic charities. The children were referred to, quaintly, as “scholars.”

A significant minority of St. Michael’s scholars were statutory delinquents. Many were suffering from emotional disturbances of varying severity. All were unhappy and unloved or unwisely loved or loved ineffectively. All were mildly malnourished; in later life, Mackay would find himself unable to remember the food at St. Michael’s as food, only as the stuff of guilt or sickness. All were subject to unremitting petty violence.

To be a scholar at St. Michael’s was to live on one’s nerves. A good beating was forever at hand. Pale children were always whispering, their jaws rigid like ventriloquists’, about surprise attacks, revenge and retribution. Sometimes it would seem to Mackay that his grade school years were a single continuous process of being found out in transgression and punished. At other times he would recall them as a physical and moral chaos of all against all.

Mackay had been placed in St. Michael’s by reason of his mother’s incapacity. His virgin aunt, a schoolteacher, paid the brothers. Mackay’s mother was a single parent before her time and a paranoid schizophrenic. She was an educated, well-spoken woman, and Mackay could remember that in the years before their separate institutionalization she had often read to him. He could also remember lying with her in a dark room while music that was solemn and frightening played from an ornate wooden radio. Once in St. Michael’s he forgot, for a while, his mother’s face. He thought of her as a vague, troubled, tender presence. He was surprised, as an adult, to learn that she had been known to display a violent side.