The Day's Heat Page 12

  The unborn child was an iron connection between her and the priest, an irrevocable tie to the afternoon in the rectory. Certainly Father Palmer thinking the child was his wasn’t what she’d planned or intended. Objectively, scientifically, Lee knew that the milky fluid that had run down her leg as she rose from the gray and gold tapestried bed that afternoon was of no consequence, that the mouth of her uterus was already sealed, sealed irrevocably. However, that fact had lost all validity when she lay beneath the priest’s cool muscled length, when he slid her arms above her head, crossing her hands and holding her motionless except for her matching responses to the movements of his hips. Lee had felt an opening inside, a release that spread from a point she hadn’t known existed out to the ends of her fingertips, down to the soles of her feet. The weak climaxes she’d felt before, to her own tentative fingers and to Charles’s abrupt, almost random thrusts, were mild tremors in comparison to that flowering wave upon wave generated by David Palmer’s body.

  That feeling could have made a baby, she told herself. It was a loosening, a breaking up of the soil of the flesh, and into that soil the seed of a child could have been planted. Unconsciously, consciously, reality disintegrating before what was felt, Lee consigned the child to the priest. With a cracked, single-minded persistence, the feeling dictated that but for an accident of timing, the child was David Palmer’s.

  For what had the man planned or wanted? Lee asked over and over. Had he wanted that one afternoon and then to go on as if it never happened?

  Except for a vague, passing impression of sorrow on the priest’s face, a shine in his eyes that first Sunday at St. Jerome’s, and the feeling that he was often looking at her the following Sundays while she kept her head bent over her hands, there had been no other sign from him for over three months. Lee identified with the woman who wrote to an advice columnist in The Strickland Free Press: “We had a wonderful evening together, the sex was magnificent, but he never called back or returned my calls.”

  The columnist answered, “What did you expect? Promiscuity does not usually end in marriage.”

  Well, at least I didn’t call him, Lee consoled herself. Asking Ralph where the priest was that next morning had been humiliation enough.

  But the confession had changed everything. Just change the rules, Lee thought, then deuces will win and aces can go to blue blazes. Now, there was a spider’s thread, tough as wire between them: a tugging, vibrating strand anchored somewhere inside her head. On the other end was David Palmer, and she could feel him as though on the end of a long tether, driving out to Anthony’s Acres to confer with Sister Ellen on the school’s spring festival, or at the desk in the front office of the rectory counseling a couple on the difficulties of marriage (as if he knew), going about the parish business of births, deaths, and weddings. But most of all she saw, felt him, through this invisible strand, knew him to be sitting in the ornate Morris chair in the wide hall, reluctant to climb the staircase, reluctant to lie on the tapestried bed. Over and over, she pictured him in that long entryway, the hall with the wide polished boards that Father Kennedy hated so, the hall where at the foot of the staircase they had paused before going up to the bedroom, the hall where he now sat and looked at but didn’t see the shining boards.

  With a blank face, Lee asked Father Kennedy, “I know your routine by heart, Patrick, but what does Father Palmer do all day?” She placed the old priest’s coffee mug in front of him. Might as well talk about what she was thinking about on those Saturday evening visits or Father Kennedy would be off on his disagreements with Sister Ellen. Better to hear about his dislike of the young priest, rather than the vague hatred of the old nun.

  “Very precisely, my dear. His Eminence arranges his day by the minute. That’s why, when he first came, I knew we couldn’t live together. A place for everything and everything in its place. You know the type.” The old priest paused, glancing at the comfortable, disorderly scene in front of the dining-room table.

  Cassie and Lill were cutting collage pictures, a project the kindergarten did about every three weeks, always preceded by a note from the teacher asking for old magazines. It was an art form Cassie loved since she could direct her younger sister more or less successfully to a glued random arrangement of images on brightly colored construction paper. Cassie gave orders in her sternest teacher’s voice, for Lill was prone to start cutting the paper into smaller and smaller snippets, seemingly unable to stop, enjoying her recent mastery over the round-tipped instrument. Lee would place the girls’ productions on the door and sides of the refrigerator, and from a distance the bright colors and shapes, surrounded by solid dark borders was pleasing and hid the rusted streaks that ran the length of the secondhand appliance.

  “Father Palmer does everything by appointment and according to some rule of the Bishop or some committee,” Father Kennedy grumbled. “He and Sister Ellen make a great, grand pair, love. Old biddy has more committees in the parish than the English Government. ‘Come lead us in prayer, Father. We’re forming a committee for the formation of another committee.’” The old priest mimicked the elderly nun’s piping soprano.

  Men, Lee thought, lining up the ones she knew: her dark Lebanese father and uncles, enterprising, honest, and gregarious to the point of being oily; Father Kennedy, ancient and burly as a caveman, thriving on nicotine and caffeine, and his dislike of change; and the Bettlemain men, their pale paunchiness hiding the mulish strength it took to run the plumbing business.

  David Palmer alone stood apart and in darkness. I don’t know him, she thought.

  “Sister Ellen thinks you’re wonderful,” Lee felt obligated to say even if it was getting Father Kennedy away from the subject of the younger priest.

  Sister Ellen, principal of St. Anthony’s school, viewed herself and Father Kennedy as a pair of pioneers, missionaries in south Georgia. “Together in the springtime of our senility,” the old nun would say, “we built Anthony’s Acres.” It was the truth, for Father Kennedy well into his seventies and Sister Ellen more than sixty had arranged the purchase of the land and the building of the school, the auditorium, and the convent. It was a phrase the thin brittle lady in the black and white habit often repeated, and Lee knew it jangled Father Kennedy’s nerves down to his bones.

  “Now, it’s the old girl’s shoes what are driving me to distraction,” Father Kennedy said that evening. “That new pair she’s bought. They squish and squeak: squish, squeak down to the very first pew at seven o’clock Mass every morning; squish, squeak to Communion; squeak back to the pews; and finally at long last, squeak, squeak, she’s out the door. It’s ruining the Mass for me.” He paused to take a deep drag off his cigarette. “And to make me blood boil, she calls out the beginning of the prayers as if I were a first grader. Let me hesitate one second, and she acts like I’ve lost my place. I’m going to chastise her one day, old biddy, straight from the altar.”

  Lee had to admit that the old nun’s shoes, just recently—perhaps because Father Kennedy had pointed it out—had started making a sound on the marble floor of the church, but it was not overly loud or distracting. And it was just Sister Ellen’s way, as with most elderly people—Father Kennedy included—to want to be in charge. The old nun had even, on one occasion, finished a sentence for the Bishop himself. At Confirmation, in front of the entire church, when Bishop Payne hesitated, she’d supplied him with a date: “St. Anthony’s church was built in 1929, your Lordship.”

  Setting the Bishop straight should have made the old nun a saint in Father Kennedy’s eyes, but it hadn’t.

  Sister Ellen, in contrast, thought Father Kennedy and herself the best of friends. “And how is the grand old fellow doing today? Still puffing away, I’m sure,” she would say to Lee during their chance meetings. “You see him so much more often than I do.” At first, Lee had expected some critical remark about the old man, but the pale, lined face of the holy woman was smooth with good will.

  It was just a difference in style. Sister Ellen, so
ciable and energetic, bird-like in her hopping from one project to another, managing St. Anthony’s school of 100 children, its parents and problems, and five other charities. Father Kennedy was her exact opposite, a solitary bear lumbering on a single-minded tract. The old priest did God’s work in an indecipherable way—even to himself—and resented all advice, all interference.

  By the time Lee had come to know the two old people, their roles in the one-sided duel were firmly set. Father Kennedy hid in his office or in the old school, while Sister Ellen scurried on her errands, unaware that the priest was eluding her.

  “You’re expecting again?” Father Kennedy asked, glancing at her abdomen and pulling Lee out of her speculations.

  “Yes,” Lee answered, and rested her hand on the growing rise of her stomach. “I’ll have to start wearing maternity smocks pretty soon. Almost all my regular clothes are too tight.”

  Lee could see Father Kennedy wrestling against the questions he would have asked if they were in the confessional: “You decided to have another child?”

  “It was an accident,” Lee said, looking down at her hands. “But then there are no accidents, are there?”

  Father Kennedy nodded slowly in humble acceptance of the lie.

  And after that, there was a muddled sadness to their conversation, making Lee more aware of the rain-gathering darkness of the January evening outside the dining-room window. The old priest stood soon afterwards, bending to smooth Lill’s and Cassie’s fair hair back from where it was falling over their eyes. “You two are the angels of this house,” he said, and then to Lee, “Another one like these lassies can’t be anything but a blessing.” But it was as if she and the old man had had a quarrel, for he left without his usual third cup of coffee and without a mention of taking in a movie.

  Lee watched the red and yellow Buick pull out and drive away in the rain. The streaked view of the car’s colors, the red taillights smearing, brought back a gloomy afternoon at Mount De Sales, sitting in a classroom, listening to a young nun reading a poem about a red wagon in the rain. Odd to think of those anxious days of compositions and grades. Odd to think of that slender girl in the navy-blue school uniform. Had she ever really existed? What had the poem meant?

  Again, Lee counted on her fingers the months that would have to pass before the baby was born: February, March, April, May, June. The cold winter days and the hot humid summer months stretched out before her like an endurance test, a prison sentence.

  The next day Lee sat at the bridge table, miserable in the binding of the waistband of her herringbone skirt. She’d moved the side button over, but it was only the long, full white sweater—a hand-me-down of Ray’s—that made it possible to wear the skirt at all. The next time I’m dummy, Lee told herself, I’ll go to the bathroom, undo the button, and put the zipper halfway down.

  Janet Burrow bid a pre-emptive three spades, Lee passed, Terry Lynn said four spades, Claire passed, and the bidding was over. It was up to Lee to lead, and she glanced at her mother-in-law, who today happened to be her partner. Up until that afternoon, Peggy Higgs, the worst player in the duplicate club, had been assigned to Lee in an unspoken agreement that the most inexperienced player could best put up with Peggy’s poor bidding. Today, however, Claire’s partner and Peggy were absent, so mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were joined in a nervous alliance.

  Lee’s glance to Claire’s face was the same one she’d given to each woman during the bidding. Still in that instant, she caught a distinct up and down movement of her mother-in-law’s eyes to the far left side of her bridge hand. Lee knew from the long hours her mother-in-law spent practicing with mock hands that Claire arranged her cards in a distinctive pattern. “I put the clubs and spades on the left side together and the hearts and diamonds on the right. That way anyone peeking won’t find it so easy.”

  “Why would anybody want to peek?” Lee had asked.

  “A peek is worth two finesses,” Claire said, biting her full, rosy bottom lip, not joking.

  Now, Claire was directing her eyes to the club suit, Lee knew. She led her highest club, a king. The play went on, Janet and Terry Lynn went down two tricks—set two—down extra points because they were vulnerable. “How did you know clubs were my worse suit?” Terry Lynn questioned. Claire wrote down the score, drawing a line under the numbers with a sharp, sure scratch of the pen. “Good lead, partner,” she said, without looking up.

  Terry Lynn, in an annoyed way, tapped Lee’s sweater at the neckline. “Your sweater’s on backwards.”

  At first, Lee, her mind all taken up with the cheating, didn’t understand. Terry Lynn reached, tapped sharply again with her finger at the label just under Lee’s chin, and Lee realized that in her concern for hiding her stomach that morning she’d put the boat-necked sweater on backwards. But what did it matter? The sweater was large and loose and fit the same, front or back.

  “I just can’t stand things the wrong way.” Terry Lynn jammed the cards back into the metal holder and smacked it down hard on the table.

  Without thinking, Lee grabbed the bottom of the sweater and jerked it up, over her head, and off. Hardly seeing the three faces that ringed her in the passing of the white knitted material, she turned the sweater and pulled it back down over her head.

  “Well, we can’t have things the wrong way, can we?” she asked.

  Afterwards, she realized that to take her arms out of the sweater and turn it, still keeping it over her body would have been best, that is, the best way if she was going to stay put at the bridge table and change her sweater. She and Ray had changed their clothes in that manner in the dorms at summer camp. But why on earth had she pulled the sweater off in her mother-in-law’s house, at her mother-in-law’s bridge table?

  Patting Lee’s shoulder, Claire came to the rescue. “Isn’t it time we broke for dessert?” she asked in the heart-beating silence that came after the sweater was back on. Like an ocean liner in a stiff, blue-brocade dress, her girdle holding her erect, pushing her large bosom out even farther, she rose from the bridge table.

  There was a bustle then to bring in the large slices of Boston cream pie that Willie Mae had prepared that morning.

  “The maid’s taking care of my grands, but we can manage, can’t we, Lee, honey?” Claire explained, as she and Lee passed the plates and refilled the coffee cups among the protesting women. “I really shouldn’t eat another slice, but Claire’s Willie Mae fixes a Boston cream that’s straight out of heaven.”

  The next afternoon, the bridge party, all but Lee taking off her sweater, was written up in The Strickland Free Press under “Society News,” telling of Mrs. Lon Bettlemain’s pale-blue dress, to match her china-blue eyes. “They didn’t mention the dried winter nosegays I had on the tables,” Claire complained, sitting in Charles’s recliner, reading the write-up to Lee from the ladies’ page.

  “Well, there’s a lot of news they miss,” Lee wanted to say, folding from the pile of clothes she’d brought in from the line, but instead she told her mother-in-law that she’d be having another grandchild at the end of June.

  All in all, Claire took the news pretty well. She had “suspicioned” that Lee was pregnant. And wouldn’t it be nice to have a boy this time?

  Suddenly, Lee remembered her mother’s stories of miscarriage: one before Lee was born and another right after Ray—her mother’s insistence that those were her lost sons. At the time it had seemed just another way for Darcy to make things worse, another reason to drink.

  Claire was going on: this baby would be the boy! Also, she wanted Lee to play bridge that Friday at Moody Air Base, where they played for big prizes: table arrangements, televisions, cash. There was a scheming look on Claire’s face that recalled the position of the club suit.

  “I can’t,” Lee said, “too much sewing,” but thought, What? Cheat at cards again? This time for larger stakes? No thank you: petty crime. I’ve already passed that point. I’m into grand larceny here, lady, or is it grand sin? But it looked li
ke she’d never have a chance to do that again.

  “What does Charlie think?” Claire asked.

  “I’m worried,” Lee started and faltered. “I know he doesn’t want another baby this soon.”

  “Oh, those men, they don’t know what they want. They just don’t want to be bothered,” Claire said. “Leave ’em be, I say. I take care of the house; they take care of the business. What you need to do is stop sewing and get your allowance.”

  “My allowance?”

  “Sure,” Claire said, flapping her large white hands down at what was obvious to her. “If you hadn’t started making your own money, Lon would have given you an allowance.”

  “How much?” Lee asked.

  “Well, I get $50 a week,” Claire answered. “Out of that I pay Willie Mae, my groceries, and anything else that comes up. I reckon Lon would have given you at least $25. What do you make sewing? I’ve always wondered.”

  Lee stopped folding clothes and explained to a rapt Claire the workings of her budget, her payments, omitting only Ray’s twenty dollars a week and the five to Willie Mae.

  Claire confided that she’d married Lon Bettlemain late in life, unexpectedly. “He was already bald and fat by then, and we had to live with his mother for eleven years.”

  Through Claire’s eyes, Lee was able to see: It was more than a plain, freckled thirty-year-old spinster could have hoped for: a husband, children, her own home, an allowance.